A handful of currencies, especially the US dollar, play a dominant role in international trade. We survey the active theoretical and empirical literature that documents patterns of currency use in global trade, the implications of dominant currencies for international transmission of shocks,...

The modern notion of an international currency involves use in areas of international finance and trade that extend well beyond central banks' coffers. In addition to their important roles as foreign exchange reserves, international currencies are most frequently used to denominate corporate and...

We establish that global portfolios are driven by an often neglected aspect: the currency of denomination of assets. Using a dataset of $27 trillion in security-level investment positions, we demonstrate that investor holdings are biased toward their own currencies to such an extent that each...