As evident in Eq. (15.6), FC debt issuers’ potential uncovered
currency bargains can be decomposed into two
distinct parts: a nominal interest rate premium and an
expected rate of foreign currency appreciation. In a series
of regressions, McBrady and Shill find that issuers
respond opportunistically to both. Collectively, they issue
a greater share of bonds in those currencies, whose
nominal interest rates are relatively low in comparison
to other currencies in their sample. Across all currencies
in the sample, currency shares increase by 2.4% on an average
for every 10 bps increase in nominal interest cost
savings. McBrady and Schill also find that borrowers collectively
issue a greater share of bonds in currencies,
whose exchange rates have appreciated over the previous
year. While estimated sensitivities are lower, with
currency shares increasing by an average of 20 bps for
each 10 bps increase in relative rates of appreciation,
the economic sensitivity is arguably comparable given
the much greater variability observed in exchange rate
movements. Overall, this evidence suggests that bond issuers
do not believe that the UIP holds. Instead, they appear
to believe that lower nominal interest rates ultimately translate into lower realized borrowing costs
over time. Given that borrowers issue more bonds in currencies
that have recently appreciated, they also appear
to believe that exchange rates do not tend to offset differences
in local and foreign interest rates, but instead that
they are mean-reverting over time. Interestingly, this belief
subsequently appears to be validated in the data. The
average bond offering in McBrady and Schill’s sample
precedes a beneficial 150 bps depreciation in the issue
currency in the year following the bond’s issuance.
While more comprehensive than previous analyses,
McBrady and Schill’s analysis of uncovered currency
bargains largely confirms previous anecdotal findings.
On the other hand, their truly novel finding is that the
borrowers in their sample also appear to prefer issuing
bonds in those currencies, whose interest rates remain
low even after hedging currency risk with currency
swaps. This suggests that bond issuers do not believe
that the CIP holds at the longer maturities relevant to
their borrowing decisions. Instead, they opportunistically
issue a greater share of bonds in those currencies
that offer the greatest ‘covered currency bargains’ as
measured by the deviations from the CIP identified in
Eq. (15.5). Across the full sample of currencies, currency
shares increase by an average of 7.5% in response to a
10 bps increase in covered interest cost savings. By varying
their issuance in this manner, bond issuers collectively
lower their borrowing costs by between 4 and
18 bps in comparison to a naı¨ve alternative strategy in
which they simply issue the average amount issued in
each currency over the entire sample period in each year.
While these borrowing cost savings might seem modest
on the surface, they are achieved without incurring currency
risk. They also translate into significant annual interest
cost savings given the large quantity of FC bonds
that are issued. Savings of this magnitude are also consistent
with the type of short-term deviations from the
CIP that would be expected in well-functioning markets.
Interestingly, covered interest cost savings also appear to
peak in event time in the period immediately preceding
bond issuance and to decline steadily thereafter. This evidence
suggests that the issuers that McBrady and Schill
(2007) consider either perfectly ‘time’ their FC bond issues
perfectly or that their FC bond offerings and currency
swap transactions help drive foreign bond yields
and currency swap rates toward parity over time.
In a follow-up paper, McBrady et al. (2010) (henceforth,
‘MSM’) expand the analysis to consider a broad
sample of corporate nonfinancial issuers. While results
from their earlier analysis provide compelling evidence
that governments and other sovereign agency issuers
opportunistically choose the foreign currencies in which
to issue their bonds, it is not obvious that corporate
issuers necessarily follow suit. Corporate issuers, for
example, might face much more significant costs of
financial distress than sovereign entities, potentially
making them less willing to issue bonds in foreign currencies
and leave their principal unhedged. Sovereign
borrowers might also realistically have superior information
than corporations on the future path of exchange
rates and interest rates, given that both are susceptible to
policy influence. For these reasons, corporations might
be less eager than sovereigns to choose their issue currencies
in response to differences in interest rates or expectations
about future rates of currency depreciation.
With regard to potential covered cost savings, some
corporate borrowers might also lack access to currency
swap markets either because of their relatively small
scale or because of poor credit quality. For these reasons,
corporations might be relatively less able to exploit potential
covered interest cost savings. On the other hand,
corporations arguably have clearer economic incentives
to minimize their borrowing costs. So, they may be more
likely than sovereign issuers to engage in opportunistic
issuance.
In actuality, the MSM find that the behavior of corporate
and sovereign issuers is largely the same. For a
broad sample of corporate nonfinancial issuers domiciled
in 21 different countries, the MSM find consistent
evidence that corporations, such as sovereign borrowers,
actively vary the currencies in which they issue their
bonds in an attempt to lower their borrowing costs on
both uncovered and covered bases. Overall, however,
they appear to achieve more modest cost savings, likely
because of the presence of a large number of natural
hedging-based issues in the full sample. On the other
hand, during high-issuance periods for each currency –
periods in which the relative share of opportunistic issues
is likely to be high – the MSM find that firms achieve
savings that are comparable to or even greater than the
results presented in McBrady and Schill (2007) for sovereign
government and agency issuers. Firms achieve nominal
interest cost savings of between 60 and 80 bps over
the cost of borrowing in other sample currencies by issuing
bonds in relatively low-interest currencies during
high-issuance months. Over the subsequent year,
uncovered foreign currency borrowers also benefit from
issuing in currencies that tend to depreciate by between
175 and 200 bps more than other sample currencies.
During high-issuance periods for each currency, corporate
issuers also benefit from interest rates that remain
relatively low even after hedging currency risk with currency
swaps. On average, borrowers appear to achieve
covered cost savings of between 3 and 4 bps during
high-issuance periods. Significantly, larger savings (up
to around 10 bps) were achieved by large, investment
grade issuers with relatively low return on assets from
the major developed markets, confirming anecdotal evidence
that these types of borrowers have the strongest incentives
and greatest ability to exploit apparent covered