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We provide a comprehensive account of the evolution of the currency composition of sovereign and corporate external borrowing by emerging markets from 2003 to 2017. We show that a higher reliance on foreign currency debt by the corporate sector is associated with higher sovereign default risk. We introduce local currency sovereign debt and private sector currency mismatch into a standard sovereign debt model to examine how the currency composition of corporate borrowing affects the sovereign’s incentive to inflate or default. A calibration of the model generates the empirical patterns of sovereign credit risk.

We characterize how U.S. global systemically important banks (GSIBs) supply short-term dollar liquidity in repo and foreign exchange swap markets in the post-Global Financial Crisis regulatory environment and serve as the "lenders-of-second-to-last-resort". Using daily supervisory bank balance sheet information, we find that U.S. GSIBs modestly increase their dollar liquidity provision in response to dollar funding shortages, particularly at period-ends, when the U.S. Treasury General Account balance increases, and during the balance sheet taper of the Federal Reserve. The increase in the dollar liquidity provision is mainly financed by reducing excess reserve balances at the Federal Reserve. Intra-firm transfers between depository institutions and broker-dealer subsidiaries within the same bank holding company are crucial to this type of "reserve-draining" intermediation. Finally, we discuss factors that contributed to the repo spike in September 2019 and the subseque nt response of U.S. GSIBs to recent policy interventions by the Federal Reserve.

We document that governments whose local currency debt provides them with greater hedging benefits actually borrow more in foreign currency. We introduce two features into a government's debt portfolio choice problem to explain this finding: risk-averse lenders and lack of monetary policy commitment. A government without commitment chooses excessively counter-cyclical inflation ex post, which leads risk-averse lenders to require a risk premium ex ante. This makes local currency debt too expensive from the government's perspective and thereby discourages the government from borrowing in its own currency.

Nominal debt provides consumption-smoothing benefits if it can be inflated away during recessions. However, we document empirically that countries with more countercyclical inflation, where nominal debt provides better consumption-smoothing, issue more foreign-currency debt. We propose that monetary policy credibility explains the currency composition of sovereign debt and nominal bond risks in the presence of risk-averse investors. In our model, low credibility governments inflate during recessions, generating excessively countercyclical inflation in addition to the standard inflationary bias. With countercyclical inflation, investors require risk premia on nominal debt, making nominal debt issuance costly for low credibility governments. We provide empirical support for this mechanism, showing that countries with higher nominal bond-stock betas have significantly larger nominal bond risk premia and borrow less in local currency.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

We find that deviations from the covered interest rate parity condition imply large, persistent, and systematic arbitrage opportunities in one of the largest asset markets in the world. Contrary to the common view, we show that these deviations for major currencies are not explained away by credit risk or transaction costs. Furthermore, these deviations are highly correlated with nominal interest rates in the cross section and in the time series, higher at quarter ends post-crisis, significantly correlated with other fixed-income spreads, and much lower after proxying for banks’ balance sheet costs. These empirical findings point to key frictions in financial intermediation and their interactions with global imbalances during the post-Global Financial Crisis period.

We investigate how market participants price and manage counterparty risk in the post-crisis period using confidential trade repository data on single-name credit default swap (CDS) transactions. We find that counterparty risk has a modest impact on the pricing of CDS contracts, but a large impact on the choice of counterparties. We show that market participants are significantly less likely to trade with counterparties whose credit risk is highly correlated with the credit risk of the reference entities and with counterparties whose credit quality is relatively low. Furthermore, we examine the impact of central clearing on CDS pricing. Contrary to the previous literature, but consistent with our main findings on pricing, we find no evidence that central clearing increases transaction spreads.

We examine the question of why a government would default on debt denominated in its own currency. Using a newly constructed dataset of 14 emerging markets, we document that the private sector continues to borrow from abroad in foreign currency while sovereigns increasingly borrow from foreigners in local currency. Because depreciation can be very costly for a corporate sector with a currency mismatch due to foreign currency liabilities, emerging market sovereigns may still prefer to default on local currency sovereign debt rather than inflate the debt away. Using our crosscountry dataset, we show that a higher reliance on external foreign currency corporate financing is associated with a higher default risk on sovereign debt. We quantify the eects of corporate balance sheet mismatch on sovereign credit risk by introducing local currency sovereign debt and private currency mismatch into a standard sovereign debt model. The model demonstrates how the currency composition of corporate borrowing aects the sovereign’s incentive to inflate or default in times of fiscal stress. Reductions in the share of private external debt in foreign currency can lead to significant reductions in sovereign default risk. A calibration of the model generates the empirical patterns of currency and credit risk in local currency sovereign debt documented in Du and Schreger (2014).

The Newey and West (1987) estimator has become the standard way to estimate a heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) covariance matrix, but it does not immediately apply to time series with missing observations. We demonstrate that the intuitive approach to estimate the true spectrum of the underlying process using only the observed data leads to incorrect inference. Instead, we propose two simple consistent HAC estimators for time series with missing data. First, we develop the Amplitude Modulated estimator by applying the Newey-West estimator and treating the missing observations as non-serially correlated. Secondly, we develop the Equal Spacing estimator by applying the Newey-West estimator to the series formed by treating the data as equally spaced. We show asymptotic consistency of both estimators for inference purposes and discuss finite sample variance and bias tradeoff. In Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that the Equal Spacing estimator is preferred in most cases due to its lower bias, while the Amplitude Modulated estimator is preferred for small sample size and low autocorrelation due to its lower variance.