Tag: exchange rates

The Dollar and the Global Monetary Cycle

Posted on November 11, 2019 | Policy Brief

A bunch of dollar bills covering table that represents capital flows in Russia

The dominance of the dollar in international markets is at the heart of recent policy and academic debates at almost all conferences on international economics. Most recently, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has suggested a new global electronic currency to reduce the dominance of the dollar (Carney 2019). What are the negative effects of the dollar’s dominance, and how can countries protect against its influence? We answer this and other related questions in our recent paper (Egorov and Mukhin 2019), which we summarize in this policy brief.

Stable prices

What are the sources of the dollar’s global powers? Ultimately, the dollar matters as long as it is used by private agents in their transactions. Recently, a lot of attention has been devoted to the role of the dollar in global financial markets, which gives rise to the so-called “global financial cycle” (Rey 2013). However, a growing literature (e.g., Gopinath et al. 2019) shows that the dollar also plays a central role in international goods markets with many exporters setting their prices in the U.S. currency. According to recent estimates, the share of goods with dollar prices is about 4-5 times larger than the share of the US in global trade (Gopinath 2016). That means many firms set prices in dollars even when they trade not with the US, but with other countries.

Even though this global invoicing role of the dollar may not seem important, many studies show that prices remain stable, or sticky, in the currency in which they are set. This means that in many countries, the prices of imported goods are almost fixed in dollars. Then movements in the dollar exchange rate immediately result in changes in the prices of these goods in the local currency. Of course, even dollar prices adjust occasionally, but recent empirical studies show that the dollar prices of imported goods remain pretty stable even two years after a change in the exchange rate (Gopinath et al. 2019).

Such stability of global prices in dollars has three important implications. First, the dollar exchange rate affects the volume of global trade. In any given country, appreciation of the dollar raises the local-currency prices of imported goods. Because of that, consumers switch from more expensive imported goods to cheaper domestic goods. The same happens in other countries, and thus all consumers buy fewer foreign goods, and the volume of global trade decreases.

Second, the dollar exchange rate affects world inflation and output. A rise in import prices after appreciation of the dollar increases inflation both directly and indirectly, through an increase in the costs to all domestic firms that use imported goods as inputs. The higher the costs, the more firms raise their prices, and the higher the inflation. Indeed, a recent empirical study shows that the dollar exchange rate is a good predictor of world inflation and the volume of global trade (Gopinath et al. 2019). Moreover, an increase in global inflation reduces consumers’ real income, and this leads to lower aggregate demand and thus to a reduction in world output. Therefore, dollar appreciation could trigger a world recession.

Third, we show that all countries find it optimal to partially peg their exchange rates to the dollar. Since changes in the dollar exchange rate could negatively affect output and inflation, all countries try to protect themselves from these external shocks. If it is not possible for a government to convince its private agents to stop using the dollar in their transactions, then the government could reduce the changes in the dollar exchange rate by pegging its currency to the dollar. Of course, this policy cannot address all issues, but at least the prices of imported goods can become more stable in the local currency.

Rigged system

What does this global use of the dollar imply for the US? First of all, it enables the US’s so-called “privileged insularity”. Since the prices of both local and imported goods in the US are stable in dollars, changes in exchange rates do not lead to inflation or expenditure switching between home and foreign goods. This gives rise to a significant asymmetry across countries: the dollar exchange rate has a substantial effect on other countries, but all other exchange rates have only a negligible effect on the US.

We show that the asymmetry in countries’ exposure to exchange rate shocks leads to an asymmetry in their monetary policy. All countries find themselves responding to US policy by partially pegging their exchange rates to the dollar. In contrast, due to its “privileged insularity”, the US can focus on its domestic targets, respond primarily to domestic shocks, and potentially achieve higher welfare than other countries, which are more exposed to foreign shocks.

So, when a local recession hits the US, the Fed stimulates the US economy regardless of the conditions of the world economy. Then all other countries stimulate their economies as well in order to keep their exchange rates more stable relative to the dollar. This creates what we call a “global monetary cycle”, where the whole world becomes more synchronized even when there are no global shocks common to all countries. The more prominent the role of the dollar is in the international goods market, the stronger this “global monetary cycle”. In fact, a recent empirical study confirms this prediction and shows that the higher the share of the dollar in the country’s import basket is, the stronger its peg to the dollar, and the more nominal interest rates follow the US interest rates (Zhang 2018).

Leveling the playing field

What can other countries do to diminish negative consequences from the “global monetary cycle”? One possible way to discourage firms from using the dollar could be the creation or expansion of a monetary union such as the Euro area. The larger the Eurozone is, the more countries within this area use the euro and not the dollar to trade with each other. Moreover, the Eurozone’s trading partners are more likely to use the currency of a larger monetary union (Mukhin 2018). If enough firms switch from the dollar to the euro, then we find that the Eurozone may gain the same advantage of “privileged insularity” as the US.

Another frequently mentioned policy to protect from the undesirable exchange rate effects is the use of capital controls, which are found to be effective in softening the “global financial cycle”. For example, a tax on borrowing in foreign currency can reduce the size of the foreign-denominated debt, so that depreciation does not lead to an increase in the nominal debt burden and start a recession. However, we find that under the “global monetary cycle” these measures turn out to be much less effective. Basically, capital controls primarily affect decisions in financial markets. But it’s the decisions of global exporters, that is decisions in international goods markets, that give rise to the “global monetary cycle”. And the effect of capital controls on exporters is much more subtle if present at all.

Conclusion

To sum up, we argue that as long as many firms continue to set prices in dollars, it is optimal for central banks to smooth movements in exchange rates in order to diminish the effects of the dollar on their economies. This partial peg to the dollar leads to the “global monetary cycle”. As a result, the US is free to implement a mostly independent monetary policy, while the rest of the world has to follow their lead.

References

  • Carney, M.,  2019. “The Growing Challenges for Monetary Policy in the Current International Monetary and Financial System”, Speech given at the Jackson Hole Symposium.
  • Egorov, K., and D. Mukhin,  2019. “Optimal Monetary Policy under Dollar Pricing”, Working paper.
  • Gopinath, G., 2016. “The International Price System”, Jackson Hole Symposium Proceedings.
  • Gopinath, G., E. Boz, C. Casas, F. Diez, P.-O. Gourinchas, and M. Plagborg-Moller, 2019. “Dominant Currency Paradigm”, Working paper.
  • Mukhin, D., 2018. “An Equilibrium Model of the International Price System”, Working paper.
  • Rey, H., 2013. “Dilemma not Trilemma: The Global Financial Cycle and Monetary Policy Independence”, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Econoic Policy Symposium.
  • Zhang, T., 2018. “Monetary Policy Spillovers through Invoicing Currencies”, Working paper

Operating and Financial Hedging: Evidence from Trade

Posted on April 12, 2017 | Policy Brief

FREE Policy Brief - Operating and Financial Hedging Image 01.jpg

There is a large and growing literature that has modeled how real policies affect and interact with financial policies. It is important to consider such an interaction since a firm, just as a single value-maximizing agent, should make its strategic decisions optimally, taking into account all of its multi-dimensional facets (contracts with employees and suppliers, situation with market competitors, innovation, foreign-market operations and others – on the real side, and capital structure, dividend policy, IPO, hedging behavior – on the financial side). This policy brief introduces a new type of hedging exchange-rate risks through matching currencies of export revenues and import costs, and shows how it substitutes out financial hedging using currency derivatives.

Exchange-rate exposure and financial hedging around the world

Many firms are exposed to exchange-rate fluctuations in one way or the other. Because volatility is typically considered to be bad for a firm – either because small firms are risk-averse or because it may reduce the value of a risk-neutral firm through costly distress or agency costs – firms attempt to hedge it. Indeed many successfully do so. Bartram et al. (2009) report that about 60% of non-financial firms around the world use financial derivatives (forwards, futures, swaps, etc.), with the most popular type being currency derivatives (44%). These large numbers indicate the importance of risk management in general and hedging exchange-rate shocks in particular. There is also a considerable heterogeneity across countries. According to their investigation based on a subsample of world firms, currency derivative usage ranges from 6% in China and 15% in Malaysia, to 37% in the United States and 48% across Europe, to 80% in New Zealand and 88% in South Africa.

There is also some cross-sectional variation across firms. Geczy et al. (1997) report that among U.S. firms those with greater growth opportunities, tighter financial constraints, extensive foreign exchange-rate exposure and economies of scale in hedging activities are more likely to use currency derivatives.

Operational hedging

So what are potential alternatives to hedging exchange-rate exposure through currency derivatives? The literature has suggested other ways of reducing such cash-flow volatility – through operational hedges. The examples include diversifying the company’s operations and production geographically (as in Allayannis et al., 2001). The authors provide an example of Schering-Plough (a United States-based pharmaceutical company) that in their 1995 annual report suggested that hedging using financial instruments was not considered cost-effective, since the company operated in many foreign countries where the currencies would not generally move in parallel. More recent studies (e.g. Kim et al., 2006; Hankins, 2011) also support the geographical diversification of production and acquisition of foreign subsidiaries as important channels of operational hedging, and as such they can act as substitutes for financial hedging.

These papers are also part of the larger literature on the interrelations between real and financial strategies, and in particular the literature that has modeled how real policies, aimed at lowering operational risks (or alternatively increasing operating flexibility), reflect in various financial decisions (such as e.g. capital structure). Examples of such policies include the use of flexible manufacturing systems that allow changing the level of output, the product mix, or the operating “mode” (as in Brennan and Schwartz, 1985; He and Pindyck, 1992; and Kulatilaka and Trigeorgis, 2004); employing a contingent workforce (e.g. part-time and seasonal labor, as in Hanka, 1998 or workers on temporary contracts, as in Kuzmina, 2014); adopting a defined contribution, rather than a defined benefit or pension plan (as in Petersen, 1994); and many others.

Trade-related operational hedges

In Kuzmina and Kuznetsova (2016), we explore a different type of operational hedging – the one arising from exporting final goods and importing intermediate inputs from abroad at the same time. As previous literature has suggested, firms that export their final goods are naturally more exposed to exchange-rate risks due to their foreign-denominated contract obligations that have to be translated into domestic currency when the transaction clears in the future, the so-called transaction exposure of companies (Glaum, 2005). As long as volatility is costly for firms, higher exchange-rate exposure leads to more financial hedging, so previous papers indeed find a positive correlation between exporting and currency hedging (e.g. Geczy et al., 1997; He and Ng, 1998; Allayannis and Ofek, 2001).

This argument would similarly apply to firms that import their intermediate inputs from abroad, since they are similarly exposed to exchange-rate fluctuations on the cost side. In our paper, we attempt to provide new evidence on these channels, as well as to introduce a novel explanation to why not all firms hedge using financial derivatives. We show that firms that export and import at the same time hedge less using currency derivatives, and especially when volatility of exchange rate is high.  We argue that when firms both export and import at the same time, their net foreign-denominated position (and thus exchange-rate exposure) becomes lower on average, and hence there is less incentive to hedge against it. This is consistent with foreign-currency matching of costs and revenues, which is a phenomenon also observable in other data. Although in our data we cannot observe currency of individual transactions for each firm, we do so in another project based on the data from Russia. Our calculations for Russian data, based on the whole universe of import and export declarations, suggest that for the major currencies, the probability of importing in the same currency is higher than in any other currency when a firm also exports in this currency. For example, out of all firms that have exports in Euro and some imports, 82% would import in Euro. The similar number for the U.S. dollar is 71%. Such trade-related operational hedge may arise naturally for firms in the global world, thus reducing their need to use financial instruments.

Germany as an interesting laboratory

To test our hypotheses, we use hand-collected data on a sample of German public firms during 2011-2014. Germany is a particularly relevant country for testing our hypotheses for at least three reasons.

First of all, it is the world’s third largest exporter and importer and the top one in Europe. Second and most importantly, if we want to explore currency risk arising from exporting and importing, at least some (and preferably many) of the export and import transactions have to occur in a foreign currency. This means that, for example, looking at the U.S. data would not give us a lot of power in identifying our mechanism, since according to Goldberg and Tille (2008), only 5% of all U.S. export contracts are set in a currency other than the U.S. dollar. On the other hand, more than half of German exports and imports outside the euro area are denominated in a currency other than the Euro, and in particular about 30-40% of all contracts are set in U.S. dollars.  This means that our measured shares of non-euro zone exports and imports will actually have a large component of non-euro-denominated contracts, and we will have more power to measure the actual exchange-rate exposure arising from exporting and importing. Finally, we analyze the largest companies in Germany – those that trade on the Prime Standard segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, since they have to disclose their use of derivatives due to the highest accounting and transparency requirements of this listing. These mandatory disclosure rules enable us to collect the data on hedging from companies’ annual reports and perform the analysis.

Identification strategy and results

To start the analysis, we provide some cross-sectional correlations. We find that firms in industries with more out-of-euro-zone exporting (importing) have a higher propensity to hedge using currency derivatives. In particular, a firm in an industry with 10pp higher export (import) shares has on average a 10.5pp (28.9pp) higher probability of currency hedging.

Although many industries simultaneously export and import a lot, others have a substantial imbalance in terms of export and import shares. We are therefore interested in whether this translates into different hedging behaviors. By adding the interaction between export and import shares in our regression specifications, we find that firms that simultaneously export and import hedge less than firms that just export or import. This is consistent with our hypothesis that firms decrease their effective exchange-rate exposure by having both revenues and costs in foreign currency and implies that operational hedging through matched currencies is a substitute for financial hedging.

In order to strengthen the result, we complement our cross-sectional correlations with a difference-in-differences methodology. To do this, we compare firms in industries with higher and lower out-of-euro-zone export and import shares during times of higher and lower exchange-rate volatility. We find that the higher the exchange-rate volatility, the larger this substitution effect is. This finding is stronger than a simple cross-sectional correlation between exporting, importing and hedging (which can be driven by omitted factors), since it uses an arguably exogenous volatility shock to show that operational hedging substitutes for financial hedging precisely during times when firms have highest incentives to hedge. The results are robust to using a set of control variables and firm and year fixed effects.

Implications

From an applied perspective, the interrelation between operational and financial strategies of the firm suggests that the decisions of the CEO and CFO should be complementary to each other to achieve the value-maximization goal of the firm. From a policy perspective, they imply that exogenous changes in government policies aimed at certain organizational changes in the firm (e.g. export promotion policies) could have indirect consequences for their riskiness and financing decisions.

References

  • Allayannis, G., J. Ihrig, and J. P. Weston (2001), “Exchange-rate hedging: Financial versus operational strategies”. American Economic Review 91 (2), 391-395.
  • Allayannis, G. and E. Ofek (2001), “Exchange rate exposure, hedging, and the use of foreign currency derivatives”, Journal of International Money and Finance 20 (2), 273-296.
  • Bartram, S. M., G. W. Brown, and F. R. Fehle (2009), “International evidence on financial derivatives usage”, Financial Management 38 (1), 185-206.
  • Brennan, M. and E. S. Schwartz (1985), “Evaluating natural resource investments”, The Journal of Business 58 (2), 135-157.
  • Geczy, C., B. A. Minton, and C. Schrand (1997), “Why firms use currency derivatives”, Journal of Finance 52 (4), 1323-1354.
  • Glaum, M. (2005), “Foreign-Exchange-Risk Management in German Non-Financial Corporations: An Empirical Analysis”, Springer.
  • Hanka, G. (1998), “Debt and the terms of employment”, Journal of Financial Economics 48 (3), 245-282.
  • Hankins, K. W. (2011), “How do financial firms manage risk? Unraveling the interaction of financial and operational hedging”, Management Science 57 (12), 2197-2212.
  • He, H. and R. S. Pindyck (1992), “Investments in flexible production capacity”, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 16 (3-4), 575-599.
  • He, J. and L. K. Ng (1998), “The foreign exchange exposure of Japanese multinational corporations”, Journal of Finance 53 (2), 733-753.
  • Kim, Y. S., I. Mathur, and N. Jouahn (2006), “Is operational hedging a substitute for or a complement to financial hedging?” Journal of Corporate Finance 12 (4), 834-853.
  • Kulatilaka, N. and L. Trigeorgis (2004), “The general flexibility to switch: Real options revisited”, Real options and investment under uncertainty: classical readings and recent contributions, 179-198.
  • Kuzmina, O. (2014), “Operating flexibility and capital structure: Evidence from a natural experiment”, American Finance Association Conference, Philadelphia.
  • Kuzmina O. and O. Kuznetsova (2016), “Operating and Financial Hedging: Evidence from Trade”, CEFIR Working paper.

Petersen, M. (1994), “Cash flow variability and a firm’s pension choice: A role for operating leverage”, Journal of Financial Economics 36, 361-383.