Exchange Rate Dynamics And United States Dollar Denominated Sovereign Bond Prices In Emerging Markets

The study conducts an empirical test on dollar-denominated sovereign credit spreads in emerging markets, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, and Turkey to examine their relationship with each country's exchange rate and the United States (US) Treasury yields. The relationship between each country's exchange rate and the pricing of each country's US-dollar denominated sovereign bonds was particularly strong after the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. A two-factor pricing model is developed with closed-form solutions for the sovereign bonds. The correlated factors in the model are foreign exchange rates and US risk-free interest rates that follow a double square-root process relevant in a low interest rate environment. The numerical results and associated error analysis show that the model credit spreads can broadly track market credit spreads.

The development of government bond markets and, in particular, their currency composition have recently received much interest, partly because of their relation with financial crises. The authors study the determinants of the size and currency composition of government bond markets for a panel of industrial and developing countries. They find that countries with larger economies, greater domestic investor bases, and more flexible exchange rate regimes have larger domestic currency bond markets, while smaller economies rely more on foreign currency bonds. Better institutional frameworks and macroeconomic fundamentals enhance both domestic currency bond markets and increase countries' ability to issue foreign currency bonds, while they raise the share of foreign exchange bonds.

Emerging countries experience real exchange rate depreciations around defaults. In this paper, we examine this observed pattern empirically and through the lens of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. The theoretical model explicitly incorporates bond issuances in local and foreign currencies, and endogenous determination of real exchange rate and default risk. Our quantitative analysis replicates the link between real exchange rate depreciation and default probability around defaults and moments of the real exchange rate that match the data. Prior to default, interactions of real exchange rate depreciation, originated from a sequence of low tradable goods shocks with the sovereign’s large share of foreign currency debt, trigger defaults. In post-default periods, the resulting output costs and loss of market access due to default lead to further real exchange rate depreciation.

When the U.S. economy sneezes, do emerging markets catch a cold? We show that economic news, and not just monetary policy, in the United States affects financial conditions in emerging markets. News about U.S. employment has the strongest effects, followed by news about economic activity and about vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. News about inflation has instead limited effects on average. A key channel of international transmission of U.S. economic news appears to be the risk perceptions or risk aversion of international investors. We also show that some of the transmission of U.S. economic news occurs independently of the U.S. monetary policy reaction. Finally, we expand on evidence that financial conditions in the U.S. and emerging markets respond differently to U.S. monetary policy surprises, depending on the reaction of US stock prices.

We analyze the effect of the US Federal Reserve’s monetary policy on EME sovereign and corporate bond markets by focusing on two dimensions: the evolution of the structure (size and currency composition) of the bond markets and their allocations within the bond portfolios of US investors. Global factors, particularly the level of long-term US Treasury yields, matter. Across all specifications, when US long-term interest rates were low (i) EMEs issued more sovereign and private-sector local currency bonds and more private-sector foreign currency bonds and (ii) US investment in EME sovereign bonds (both local currency and USD-denominated) increased. In contrast, after controlling for the level of US long-term interest rates, measures that attempt to isolate the effects of US unconventional monetary policy are often statistically insignificant in our analysis. Local factors matter too: The local currency government bond markets in countries with stronger regulatory quality/creditor rights are larger and attract relatively more US investment. Finally, consistent with Burger et al. (2017), we find that the well-known home bias phenomenon is at least in part a home currency bias: US investors exhibit no home bias against some countries’ USD-denominated bonds, whereas for local currency bonds the familiar home bias is very present.

For about three decades until the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), Covered Interest Parity (CIP) appeared to hold quite closely—even as a broad macroeconomic relationship applying to daily or weekly data. Not only have CIP deviations significantly increased since the GFC, but potential macrofinancial drivers of the variation in CIP deviations have also become significant. The variation in CIP deviations seems to be associated with multiple factors, not only regulatory changes. Most of these do not display a uniform importance across currency pairs and time, and some are associated with possible temporary considerations (such as asynchronous monetary policy cycles).