TY  - JOUR
AU  - Feenberg,Daniel R.
AU  - Poterba,James M.
TI  - Which Households Own Municipal Bonds? Evidence From Tax Returns
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 3900
PY  - 1992
Y2  - July 1992
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3900
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3900.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Daniel R. Feenberg
National Bureau of Economic Research
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/588-0343
Fax: 617/868-2742
E-Mail: feenberg@nber.org

James M. Poterba
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-350
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA  02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-6673
Fax: 617/258-7804
E-Mail: poterba@nber.org
AB  - 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.
ER  -