We provide a comprehensive account of the evolution of the currency composition of sovereign and corporate external borrowing by emerging markets from 2003 to 2017. We show that a higher reliance on foreign currency debt by the corporate sector is associated with higher sovereign default risk. We introduce local currency sovereign debt and private sector currency mismatch into a standard sovereign debt model to examine how the currency composition of corporate borrowing affects the sovereign’s incentive to inflate or default. A calibration of the model generates the empirical patterns of sovereign credit risk.

It is surprisingly difficult to find economic variables that strongly comove with exchange rates, a phenomenon codified in a large literature as “exchange rate disconnect.” We demonstrate that a variety of common proxies for global risk appetite, which did not comove with exchange rates prior to 2007, have provided significant in-sample explanatory power for currencies since then. Furthermore, during the 2007–2012 period, U.S. purchases of foreign bonds were highly correlated with these risk measures and with exchange rates. Our results support the narrative that the U.S. dollar's role as an international and safe-haven currency has surged since the global financial crisis.