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Record W2248600694

Interest-Rate Swaps: Hedge or Bet? A Case of Canadian Universities

2014· article· en· W2248600694 on OpenAlexaffabout
Glenn Leonard

Bibliographic record

VenueSSRN Electronic Journal · 2014
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicRisk Management in Financial Firms
Canadian institutionsUniversity of FrederictonUniversity of New Brunswick
Fundersnot available
KeywordsInterest rate swapSwap (finance)Interest rateForeign exchange swapNotional amountInterest rate riskInterest rate derivativeLiborFixed interest rate loanFloating interest rateBusinessInterest rate parityEconomicsFinancial economicsMonetary economicsFinance
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

A swap agreement is a financial arrangement wherein two counterparties agree to exchange cash flows over a period on a pre-arranged basis. In an interest rate swap the exchange is between interest cash flows based on a fixed rate and those that are determined based on a variable rate. Thus one party will agree to pay a fixed interest rate on a notional principal for a certain period in exchange for receiving interest cash flows based on a variable interest rate set periodically. The variable interest rate is determined with reference to an agreed upon index. Typically the variable rates will be a certain percentage above the interbank lending rates such as LIBOR. In the international context interest rate swaps are often a combination of interest rate and currency swaps. In a currency and interest rate swap fixed interest cash flows on a nominal principal denominated in one currency will be exchanged for floating rate interest cash flows in another currency. In this paper our focus is on interest rate swaps in a domestic context only. Interest rate swaps are increasingly being used as a risk management tool. If a firm borrows on a variable interest rate it is exposed to the risk of changing interest rates in the future. To mitigate this risk the firm may enter into a swap contract wherein it will pay fixed interest on a notional principal to the swap dealer and, in turn, receive variable interest cash flows from the dealer. This effectively protects the firm from changing interest rates. When the variable interest declines the firm’s cash outflow of interest on the borrowing will be less and so will be the receipts from the swap dealer. When the variable interest goes up the increased borrowing cost will be offset by the increased receipts from the swap dealer. Though it is possible to manage the interest rate risk through other exchange traded derivatives like interest futures and options, an interest rate swap has the advantage of customization. The disadvantage is that, unlike exchange traded futures or options, terminating a swap may not be a simple process and can be costly. Although long common in the corporate sector, the use of interest rate swaps among non-financial public institutions, including universities, has increased in the past decade. Given the nature of cash flows and short term assets that are typically carried by universities it is not clear whether interest rate swaps are true hedges or un-hedge an existing natural hedge and create risk. Recently, for example, Harvard University lost US $345.3 million in terminating its interest-rate swaps. It is the purpose of this paper to study the use of interest-rate swaps in a sample of Canadian universities and investigate whether they are true hedges or actually increase a university’s financial risk. An attempt will be made using management control, organizational design concepts, and accounting theory to explain the prevalence of interest rate swaps among Canadian universities.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.657
Threshold uncertainty score0.862

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.017
GPT teacher head0.216
Teacher spread0.199 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2014
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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