Chicago Fed MuniTrack
Primary Market
Primary Market
High-Frequency Charts
The graphs below, aggregated at the monthly level, examine recent trends in primary-market issuance, offering yields, true interest costs (TIC), and the characteristics of competitive offerings.
Notes: This figure presents the total monthly primary municipal bond market issuance volume, broken down
by offering type (competitive and negotiated), in billions of USD.
Sources: Calculations based on data from The Bond Buyer's data archives.
Notes: This presents monthly averages of offering yields of negotiated and competitive offerings. Before
computing monthly averages, we first aggregate the bond yields to the offering level, weighting by bond
par amount.
Sources: Calculations based on data from The Bond Buyer's data archives and data extracted from official
statements in MSRB's Primary Market (PM) database.
Notes: This figure shows monthly averages of true interest cost (TIC) for competitive offerings.
Sources: Calculations based on data from The Bond Buyer's data archives and data extracted from official
statements in MSRB's Primary Market (PM) database.
Notes: This figure presents bid depth and bid dispersion for competitive offerings. We calculate bid
depth
as the average number of bids submitted per competitive auction. We measure bid dispersion as the
variance
of bids within an auction (in terms of yields).
Sources: Calculations based on data from The Bond Buyer's data archives.
Low-Frequency Charts
The graphs below, aggregated at the quarterly level, examine recent trends in primary-market activity based on sector, bond-size distribution, sector borrowing costs, and competitive-auction winner participation. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 examine issuance by sector and bond size, Figures 4.3 and 4.4 examine interest-cost and yield patterns by sector, and Figures 4.5 and 4.6 examine the breadth of competitive-sale auction winners.
Notes: This figure shows the total quarterly volume of municipal bond issuance, broken down by sector.
Sources: Calculations based on data from The Bond Buyer's data archives.
Notes: This figure show total quaterly bond offering count, broken down by sector.
Sources: Calculations based on data from The Bond Buyer's data archives.
Notes: This figure presents quarterly averages of offering yield, broken down by sector.
Sources: Calculations based on data from The Bond Buyer's data archives and data extracted from official
statements in MSRB's Primary Market (PM) database.
Notes: This figure plots underwriter diversity, based on total quarterly competitive offering volume,
following Ahern et al (2024).
Sources: Calculations based on data from The Bond Buyer's data archives.
Notes: This figure plots the quarterly count of active underwriters of competitive offerings. We define
an underwriter as active if it purchases at least 10 offerings in a given quarter.
Sources: Calculations based on data from The Bond Buyer's data archives.
