Working Papers


Financial Hedging and Optimal Currency of Invoicing
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Abstract

I develop a theory of the optimal currency choice for invoicing goods for international trade in the presence of imperfect financial hedging of currency risk. I demonstrate that the classic irrelevance result—that the cost of financial hedging does not impact the choice of currency invoicing—rests on the assumption that sellers set prices ex-ante and commit to fulfill any order size ex-post. I refer to this set-up as sticky prices and flexible quantities. I show that when quantities are also sticky, in the sense that the order quantity is pre-specified, then financial hedging affects the optimal currency of invoicing choice. My theory of jointly sticky prices and quantities incorporates financial frictions into existing theories of real hedging. I show that this financial hedging channel is quantitatively relevant and that it generates a feedback between macroprudential policies that affect the cost of hedging, such as capital controls and the optimal currency of invoicing. I demonstrate that macroprudential policies can affect the expenditure switching properties of the exchange rate by inducing a different choice of optimal currency of invoicing.