Foreign currency-denominated borrowing in the absence of operating incentives

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: McBrady, Matthew R.; Schill, Michael J.
• 署名单位: University of Virginia
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-405X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2006.08.004
• 发表日期: 2007
• 页码: 145-177
• 关键词: Foreign currency debt; Interest rate parity; capital structure policy

摘要

It is well known that corporations issue foreign currency-denominated debt to hedge foreign currency cash flows with offsetting interest payments. We test an alternative opportunistic motive for foreign currency-denominated borrowing. We do so by constructing a comprehensive sample of foreign currency-denominated bonds issued by sovereign government and agency issuers with no foreign currency cash flows or foreign operations. We find strong and consistent evidence that the borrowers in our sample consider cross-currency differences in covered and uncovered interest yields in choosing the currency in which to denominate their international debt. We estimate the average gains to opportunistic covered yield borrowing to be 4 to 18 basis points. Interestingly, we also find that the average bond offering in our sample precedes a large and beneficial depreciation of the issue currency over the course of the following year. These results support what has been a frequent conjecture in the foreign debt market. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.