IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mit/worpap/588.html

Which Households Own Municipal Bonds? Evidence from Tax Returns

Author

Listed:
  • Feenberg, D.R.
  • Poterba, J.M.

Abstract

This paper uses data from 1988 federal income tax returns, which asked taxpayers to report their tax-exempt interest income as an information item, to analyze the distribution of tax-exempt asset holdings. More than three quarters of the tax-exempt debt held by households was held by those with marginal tax rates of 28% or more. The paper reports two measures of the average marginal tax rate on tax-exempt debt. The first measures the increase in taxes if a small fraction of each taxpayer's exempt interest income were converted to taxable interest. This weighted average of 'first-dollar" marginal tax rates was 25.8%. A second calculation finds that if all tax-exempt interest were reported as taxable interest, taxes would rise by 27.6% of the increase in taxable interest. Many taxpayers who have substantial tax-exempt interest receipts, but low first-dollar marginal tax rates, would be driven into higher tax brackets if the exemption were eliminated but their portfolios remained the same.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Feenberg, D.R. & Poterba, J.M., 1991. "Which Households Own Municipal Bonds? Evidence from Tax Returns," Working papers 588, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:mit:worpap:588
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. James M. Poterba & Arturo Ramirez Verdugo, 2008. "Portfolio Substitution and the Revenue Cost of Exempting State and Local Government Interest Payments from Federal Income Tax," NBER Working Papers 14439, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Poterba, James M. & Verdugo, Arturo Ramírez, 2011. "Portfolio Substitution and the Revenue Cost of the Federal Income Tax Exemption for State and Local Government Bonds," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 64(2), pages 591-613, June.
    3. Poterba, James M. & Samwick, Andrew A., 2003. "Taxation and household portfolio composition: US evidence from the 1980s and 1990s," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(1), pages 5-38, January.
    4. Poterba, James M., 2002. "Taxation, risk-taking, and household portfolio behavior," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 17, pages 1109-1171, Elsevier.
    5. Eijffinger, Sylvester C. W. & Huizinga, Harry P. & Lemmen, Jan J. G., 1998. "Short-term and long-term government debt and nonresident interest withholding taxes," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(3), pages 309-334, June.
    6. Daniel Garrett & Andrey Ordin & James W Roberts & Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, 2023. "Tax Advantages and Imperfect Competition in Auctions for Municipal Bonds," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 90(2), pages 815-851.
    7. Alex Kontoghiorghes, 2022. "Do personal taxes affect investment decisions and stock returns?," Bank of England working papers 988, Bank of England.
    8. Ayers, Benjamin C & Cloyd, C Bryan & Robinson, John R, 2005. ""Read My Lips . . .": Does the Tax Rhetoric of Presidential Candidates Affect Security Prices?," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 48(1), pages 125-148, April.
    9. Thomas Luke Spreen & Ed Gerrish, 2022. "Taxes and tax‐exempt bonds: A literature review," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(4), pages 767-808, September.
    10. Andrea Mattozzi, 2010. "Policy Uncertainty, Electoral Securities, And Redistribution," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 51(1), pages 45-71, February.
    11. Brooks, Robert, 1999. "Municipal bonds: a contingent claims perspective," Financial Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 8(2), pages 71-85.
    12. Chirinko, Robert, 2023. "What went wrong? The Puerto Rican debt crisis, the “Treasury Put,” and the failure of market discipline," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    13. Edward V. Regan, "undated". "A New Approach to Tax-Exempt Bonds, Infrastructure: Financing with the AGIS Bond," Economics Public Policy Brief Archive ppb_58, Levy Economics Institute.
    14. James M. Poterba, 2001. "Taxation and Portfolio Structure: Issues and Implications," NBER Working Papers 8223, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Francis A. Longstaff, 2009. "Municipal Debt and Marginal Tax Rates: Is there a Tax Premium in Asset Prices?," NBER Working Papers 14687, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Barber, Brad M. & Odean, Terrance, 2004. "Are individual investors tax savvy? Evidence from retail and discount brokerage accounts," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(1-2), pages 419-442, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mit:worpap:588. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Linda Woodbury The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Linda Woodbury to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edmitus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.