also highlights a number of additional stylized facts
that are difficult to reconcile with a pure natural
hedging-based explanation for FC debt issuance. Munro
and Wooldridge, for example, demonstrate that the
share of bonds issued by nonresidents in virtually all
currencies has increased considerably over the past decade.
In aggregate, the growth rate of FC debt issuance
has outstripped most proxies for firms’ aggregate foreign
currency-denominated cash flows. For example,
FC debt issuance increased from roughly 10% of global
exports in the 1990s to over 14% in 2006–07 (Munro
and Wooldridge, 2009). Second, for a sample of Asian
markets, there are clear differences in the characteristics
of foreign firms that issue bonds in local markets and local
firms that issue abroad. These differences seem most
consistent with a ‘comparative advantage’ interpretation
in which the market of issuance is determined to exploit
relative pricing advantages. Finally, as the authors note,
the development of local currency swap markets is also
strongly correlated with the volume of FC debt issuance,
suggesting that a large fraction of FC debt issues are
ultimately swapped into other currencies. In fact, in
those jurisdictions that collect data on currency derivative
usage, it appears that the vast majority of FC debt
issues are immediately swapped into the issuer’s home
currency, clearly contradicting a potential natural hedging
explanation.
Overall, then, while the natural hedging motive is
fairly well established as an explanation for the FC debt
issuance of nonfinancial firms, it seems much less capable
of explaining the behavior of the largest categories of
borrowers in the international bond markets. Instead, it
seems that the most active issuers of FC debt are at least
in part motivated by the simple desire to lower their
expected borrowing costs. For this to be the case, however,
the FC bond issuers must believe that their borrowing
costs actually differ across currencies. This provides
an essential link between the microlevel financing decisions
of thousands of individual bond issuers and the
extensive macrofocused literature on IRP.