One distinction between the markets for corporate and municipal bonds involves institutional constraints that apply to some municipal bond issues. This research focuses on how public finance institutions, in particular explicit debt limits and referenda requirements, affect the borrowing cost of individual school district bond issues. The…

Models three-stage bond-rating process: whether to have a bond rated, whether to insure the bond, and estimation of the actual bond rating; tests multistage model empirically using sample of 148 bond issues representing 10 different states; finds that the par value (size) of the bond issue is decisive factor in decision to have a bond rated or…

Asserting that school district officials facing the need of extensive capital expenditures must analyze all sources of funding, this paper focuses on the predominant local funding mechanism of the school district bond issue. It presents a bond rating model with three separate stages that relate to the different choices facing a school district…