Information Aggregation, Security Design, and Currency Swaps

S-Tier
Journal: Journal of Political Economy
Year: 2002
Volume: 110
Issue: 3
Pages: 609-633

Score contribution per author:

2.681 = (α=2.01 / 3 authors) × 4.0x S-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

A security design model shows that multinational firms needing to finance their operations should issue different securities to investors in different countries in order to aggregate their disparate information about domestic and foreign cash flows. However, if the firm becomes bankrupt, investors may face uncertain costs of reorganizing assets in a foreign country and thus may value foreign assets at their average value. This penalizes superior firms with low reorganization costs. Such firms minimize the adverse selection penalty by designing securities that allocate all the cash flow in bankruptcy to investors for which the adverse selection costs are the smallest given the exchange rate. We show that this sharing rule can be implemented with currency swaps because these instruments allow the priorities of claims in bankruptcy to switch depending on the exchange rate.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:ucp:jpolec:v:110:y:2002:i:3:p:609-633
Journal Field
General
Author Count
3
Added to Database
2026-01-25