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The esoteric area of financial derivatives has become quite salient in light of the financial crisis of the last few years. In the public sector, state and local governments have increasingly employed derivatives in their bond financings. This paper analyzes state and local governments’ use of a specific type of municipal derivative instrument (a floating-to-fixed interest rate swap) in a specific type of transaction (bond refinancing). The paper provides a case study of an executed bond refinancing transaction that employed a floating-to-fixed interest rate swap quantifying the substantial long-term costs financial derivatives can impart on state and local governments. The paper concludes with some specific lessons learned about debt-related derivative usage for public financial managers and offers some suggestions for further empirical and theoretical research in this area of public financial management.

The swaps market has been the world’s fastest growing financial market in the last few decades and the literature has sought reasons to explain this rapid growth. This study addresses this issue from a UK perspective and seeks to find out which UK organizations participate in the swaps market, why they choose to use it and the problems that they have encountered. The study consisted of a survey of the treasurers of 594 organizations in the UK. The most important reason why UK companies used swaps was to match their asset and liability cash flows and to stabilize their bottom line earnings. The results of this research will be of interest to both academics and to financial managers worldwide.

Using Fortune 50 company financial statements data, this paper aims to investigate the use of interest rate swaps in post‐liquidity crisis.

The paper uses Fortune 50 company financial statements data in this study.

The paper finds that the 50 largest US firms use this derivative mainly for hedging purpose. This is consistent with the prediction that facing unprecedented level of economic uncertainty sample firms use this instrument mainly to hedge against interest rate fluctuations, thus reducing their vulnerability in the credit market.

This finding is different from the findings of prior swap literature in that speculative motivation of swaps from fixed to variable interest payments are no longer found. The authors attribute this new evidence to the changed macro‐economic environment where firms' natural reaction to the increased uncertainty is to protect assets and liabilities, not to take chances on the directions of the market interest rates.

We reviewed the fiscal 2003 financial statement footnote disclosures of the fifty states and the 100 largest cities in the United States (US) to ascertain the nature and extent of derivative activities among US state and municipal governments. There were 23 state governments and 23 municipal governments that have engaged in such transactions with an aggregate notional value approaching $32 billion. These governments enter into these transactions primarily to hedge the interest rate and cash flow risks associated with their long term variable rate demand obligations and auction rate debt. Our findings also indicate that the widespread implementation of GASB TB 2003 - 1 has improved the quality of state and municipal disclosures with respect to their derivative activities. In June 2008, the GASB issued its Statement 53 which mandates the accounting measurement of these derivative financial instruments at their fair value on the statement of net assets and promises to further improve their footnote disclosure.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if the volatility in the US dollar interest rate swap market impacts the volatility of the swap rates in the Indian swap market.

The authors use GARCH, EGARCH, and TGARCH modeling to examine volatility spillover between the US and Indian interest rate swap markets.

Evidence is found of volatility transmission from the US dollar interest rate swap markets to the Indian swap markets. There is no evidence of spillover from the Indian swap markets to the US swap markets. Furthermore, the spillover impact from the US markets to the Indian markets is also asymmetric. The impact on volatility is asymmetric for one‐year swaps, but not for five‐year swaps.

Findings from this study will also identify any arbitrage opportunities that may exist between different segments of the US dollar interest rate swap markets and help to improve interest rate swap market efficiency.

If the financial market liberalization process in these nations has been successful in integrating their market into the pool of the world market, then a foreign investor would not demand a risk‐premium in the returns on deposits in these markets. The findings of this paper are also relevant for other emerging markets' policy makers, as they try to become more integrated in the global economy and try to resolve market inefficiencies and country risk so that obstacles to foreign investments can be removed.

This paper empirically shows that the long-term persistence of negative swap spreads, which was unique phenomenon only in Korean interest rate swap market, could be caused by the covered interest rate arbitrage trading by foreign investors in Korean market. It concretely shows the fixed rates of currency swap, whose decreases expand the incentive for arbitrage trading by foreign investors, to positively influence the interest rate swap spreads. The empirical results suggests that the foreign factors might make more effect on the interest rate swap market than the spot bond market, resulting in the negative interest rate swap spreads. The results implies that, the asset pricing for interest rate swap needs to consider the foreign factors under the circumstances of open capital market.

Jefferson County, Alabama undertook a series of risky financial maneuvers in 2003 that included issuing large amounts of variable rate and auction rate securities as well as engaging in numerous interest rate swaps in order to lower the burgeoning costs of repairing its sewer system to comply with federal regulations. These complex financial instruments, intended to lower debt service costs on the countyʼs $3 billion in outstanding sewer warrants, led the county to financial bankruptcy in the wake of the financial markets collapse. This paper explores the choice of securities by analyzing the risk of adjustable rate securities and interest rate swaps, examining the Jefferson County case in detail, and providing some lessons for future financial management within the context of unexpected events such as the current recession.

Debt-related financial derivative usage by state and local governments became a very salient topic over the last few years in light of the Great Recession and its impacts on the efficacy of these financial instruments. However, there has been a dearth of systematic research on the types and kinds of derivatives state and local governments have actually employed in recent years. While anecdotes of financial derivative usage has grabbed the headlines (such as the case of Jefferson County, Alabama), there has been little research examining the derivative portfolios among states or local governments pre- and post-Great Recession. Using descriptive research, this paper attempts to rectify this gap in the literature for state governments as a means of better understanding how the recent financial crisis has impacted the critical debt management decision to use financial derivatives.

For many years interest‐rate and currency swaps have been used by multinational corporations' management as a hedge against unforeseen contingencies in the capital market. However, the current literature does not contain specific decision‐making criteria or models for use by company management to decide whether a swap should be preferred to alternative forms of obtaining debt in the capital market. This research presents models and criteria to be used by management in the decision‐making process to obtain a desirable swap transaction in a unified international capital market.

This paper explains the concepts of underhedging and overhedging in interest rate swaps and demonstrates how overhedged and underhedged swaps might be accounted for under Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 133 (FAS 133) and international Accounting Standard No. 39. To illustrate, we use an interest rate swap with receive‐fixed, pay‐fixed swap leg foreign currency to explain the un derlying differences between overhedging and underhedging on foreign exchange risk. We further clarify that when both legs of an interest rate swap are specified with the same currency as in the situation of FAS 133 ‐ Example 5 beginning in Paragraph 131, accounting for overhedging or underhedging will be no different because there is no foreign exchange overhedging or underhedging risk that impacts swap valuation.