关键词: 地方政府债券, 地方政府干预, 官员任期, 发行定价

Abstract: The local government bond issuance pricing is related to the smooth issuance of local government bonds and is one of the most important issues in the local government bond market. Due to the obvious administrative intervention in the issuance of local government bonds in our country, the interest rate is significantly lower than the secondary market pricing level, thus the research on its mechanism has become an important focus of the research on the local government bond market. Using the local government bond issuance data from May 2015 to the end of 2019 as the sample, this paper converts the monthly data into the seasonal panel data to construct a pricing model based on officials' tenure and the administrative intervention influencing factors of the pricing, so as to examine the pricing mechanism of local governments' bond issuance. The results show that officials' tenure and the local government administrative intervention are important factors affecting the interest rate spread of local government bond issuance, and officials' tenure and the interest rate spread present an inverted U-shaped relationship. In addition, the U-shaped turning point of officials' tenure is about 2 years. Further study finds that the term of officials affects the interest rate spread by adjusting the administrative intervention of local governments, making the spread even more unbalanced. At the same time, improvements in the management of treasury cash deposits will help reduce the impact of local governments' fiscal deposits on the interest rate spreads. This article further introduces the “window guidance” of the Ministry of Finance to verify the impact of the administrative intervention on the spread. It is found that the “window guidance” can effectively increase the spread, improve the issuance efficiency, and reduce the administrative intervention. Based on the research conclusions of this article regarding officials' tenure and the primary market pricing, in order to promote the rationalization of the primary market pricing, this article proposes four main policy recommendations. The first suggestion is to strengthen the treasury cash management, establish a public bidding system for fiscal deposits, improve the transparency of local governments' treasury cash management, and reduce the reliance on the accounts of the four major commercial banks. The second suggestion is to strengthen the construction of industry self-regulatory organizations, strictly manage issuers, respond to negative feedback from institutional investors, and optimize the issuance procedures. The third suggestion is to actively develop related bond derivatives, activate the local government bond secondary market, issue related bond ETFs, and promote the construction of local government bond yield curves in a timely manner. The fourth suggestion is to improve the pricing mechanism of the primary market for local government bonds, increase the level of market-based pricing, focus on establishing a pricing benchmark for issuance, clarify that the pricing of local government bonds in the primary market should be priced by their secondary yield curve, and actively introduce non-bank institutions in underwriting. The innovation of this paper is that for the first time, the characteristics of officials' tenure are introduced into the research of local government bond issuance pricing, and the pricing model based on the administrative intervention and officials' tenure is constructed. By studying the impact of these two non-market-oriented factors on the issuance pricing, it explores the motivation of local governments to intervene in bond issuance under the performance evaluation of debt audits for the local government leaders, thereby enriching existing local government bonds research results of the issuance mechanism.

Key words: Local Government Bond, Administrative Intervention, Local Officials'Tenure, Pricing of Issuance