To Örebro University

This thesis presents a comprehensive empirical analysis of the current state of Swedish sub-sovereign finance from multiple perspectives, starting from the local and moving to the national. Financial risks may occur in a long line of financial obligations and transactions. Thus, for understanding the full scope of financial risks one perspective is not sufficient. From a societal perspective the question of sub-sovereign debt management is important since mismanagement may lead to substantial risks which may impact the lives of citizens by a weakening of the Swedish public programs. Sub-sovereign debt is mainly funded by issuing financial securities in both national and foreign capital markets. Understanding the market perception regarding the risk profile of Swedish sub-sovereigns may be beneficial in improving the funding conditions of the sector and in turn reduce the cost of public investments. Financial markets are however not stand-alone entities and are heavily impacted by the policy decisions of public institutions. Thus, monetary policy plays an important role in affecting financial markets and consequently the funding conditions of Swedish sub-sovereigns. Given the contemporary approach to monetary policy this effect may be somewhat different compared to what it has been historically. There are however reasons to suspect that the national policy decisions are in large part driven by international occurrences and by foreign governments through international spillovers. Thus, for understanding the interlinked nature of financial markets a wider perspective is needed. These are some of the areas which are investigated in this thesis.

This thesis is based on four essays. The first investigates time-variation in the relationship between short interest rates and consumption in the USA and Sweden. Results based on Bayesian VAR models indicate that the short rate ceased to respond to consumption shocks when constrained by the zero lower bound. Analysis using shadow rates indicate that the Federal Reserve was able to conduct effective monetary policy through unconventional instruments, but that the Riksbank was not.

The second essay investigates the relation between municipal and government bond yields during the time when the Riksbank conducted quantitative easing in terms of government bond purchases. According to the results the spread between municipal and government bonds increased on days when the Riksbank announced bond purchases. However, further analysis using VAR models suggests that this was reversed in the medium run and the spread decreased – at least temporarily.

The third essay studies the risks associated with municipal bonds. Due to previous bailouts it is not clear whether municipal debt has an implicit government guarantee. If there is a government guarantee municipal bonds should not be associated with credit risk, at least not in excess of government bonds. Analysis of the spread between government and municipal bonds, using a VAR model and looking at the variance decomposition and impulse-response functions, establishes that municipal bond yields are associated with credit risk.

The final essay studies the forecasting accuracy of the policy rate path published by the Riksbank. For the period 2010 to 2014, the forecasting accuracy of the policy rate path was significantly worse than that of a forecast implicit in market prices. The poor forecasting accuracy during this period is attributed to that the Riksbank during this period had incentive to present a higher than expected policy rate path. This because it had reason to want long run interest rates to be high in order to discourage high debt levels due to high housing prices.