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.