会议时间：2021/9/22 12:00-13:30

会议主题：Overpricing in Municipal Bond Markets and the Unintended Consequences of the Administrative Solutions: Evidence from China

会议地点：向东楼304

内容提要：

China allows local governments to issue real municipal bonds since 2014. However, many of the municipal bonds were issued with a yield equal to or even lower than that of treasury bonds, showing an obvious overpricing. To resolve the overpricing problem in the primary market of municipal bonds, the regulatory authority set a lower bound for the issuing yield spread. In this paper, we explore the reasons for the overpricing of municipal bonds and investigate the impacts of the pricing restrictions. We find that municipal bonds issued in provinces where bond underwriters hold more shares in local treasury cash management and where SOEs are more important in the local economy have a lower issuing yield spread, a larger pricing difference between the primary and secondary markets, and worse liquidity after issuance. The results are consistent with the interpretation that bond underwriters bid up the primary market prices in exchange for other benefits from local governments. We also find that after the enforcement of lower bound restrictions, even bonds which are not supposed to be constrained by the lower bounds are priced at the boundary. The primary market of municipal bonds loses price discovery entirely. More importantly, risky bonds, which are now even more “overpriced”, have longer maturity, suggesting that local governments take advantage of the “mispricing” in their issuance choices. These findings offer important policy implications: Administrative restrictions intending to solve mispricing problems may cause even more serious mispricing.

主讲人信息：

刘晓蕾，北京大学光华管理学院教授、博导。研究领域为资本市场和公司金融。代表性学术成果发表在Journal of Political Economy、Review of Financial Studies、Journal of Finance、Journal of Financial Economics、Management Science、Journal of Monetary Economics、Journal of Corporate Finance、管理科学学报等国内外经济金融管理核心刊物。