Pricing municipal debt is a process substantially different from the valuation of corporate liabilities. Municipalities are not seized upon default. Therefore, they might own additional assets that could he made available to retire debt even when the value of pledged revenues is insufficient to do so. However, if the value of the municipality's additional assets is only observable privately, moral hazard can deter payments from these alternative revenue sources. A second consequence of lack of seizure is that the municipality survives and might return to the capital markets to raise additional funds in the future. This opens an opportunity to induce “extraordinary” payments from the value of the additional assets through multiperiod pricing controls (e.g., by following defaults with poor pricing for subsequent securities issues).

ABSTRACT The theory of financial economics has failed to distinguish advantages of callable bonds from those of short‐term debt. This paper shows that either type of borrowing can signal a firm's better prospects but that short‐term debt does so at the cost of weakened risk‐sharing with capital markets. By issuing either equity or long‐term, non‐callable debt, a firm with poor investment opportunities will not pool its prospects with those of a better firm. But equity produces superior risk‐sharing. Perhaps this explains the almost complete absence of long‐term, non‐callable bonds from observed corporate capital structures.