We examine the consequences of a sudden increase in household debt burdens by exploiting variation in exposure to household foreign currency debt during Hungary's late-2008 currency crisis. The revaluation of debt burdens leads to higher default rates and a collapse in spending. These responses...

Der Aufschwung der Weltkonjunktur hat in diesem Jahr etwas an Fahrt verloren. Nach einer schwachen Entwicklung zu Jahresbeginn folgte zwar ein recht kräftiger Anstieg der Weltproduktion im zweiten Quartal, jedoch überzeichnet dieser wohl die zugrunde liegende konjunkturelle Dynamik. Auch...

The global economy is losing steam. After a weak start in the beginning of this year, world production accelerated again in the second quarter of 2018. However, the recent expansion probably overstates its underlying momentum. At the same time, the expansion is becoming less even as compared to...

Motivated by current concerns over foreign currency exposures in emerging economies, we examine the currency denomination of business loans made in Bulgaria prior to the current crisis. We analyze information on the requested and granted currency for more than hundred thousand loans granted by...

The depreciation of the Hungarian forint in 2009 left Hungarian borrowers with a skyrocketing value of foreign currency debt. The resulting losses worsened debt overhang in to debt-ridden firms and eroded bank capital. Therefore, although Hungarian banks had partially isolated their balance...

I decompose the factors contributing to the riskiness of foreign currency borrowers. I compare counterfactual default probabilities of local and foreign currency borrowers estimated on disaggregated data. My results suggest that the currency mismatch with the depreciation of the local currency...

This paper studies the consumption response to an increase in the domestic value of foreign currency household debt during a large depreciation. We use detailed consumption survey data that follows households for four years around Hungary's 2008 currency crisis. We find that, relative to similar...

This paper examines a panel (1994-2014) of Chilean non-financial firms, both publicly listed and private, which was built to analyze the determinants of the use of foreign currency debt and their potential consequences for firm investment and profitability. It is found that foreign assets and...

Foreign currency debt is widely believed to increase risks of financial crisis, especially after being implicated as a cause of the East Asian crisis in the late 1990s. In this paper, we study the effects of foreign currency debt on currency and debt crises and its indirect effects on short-term...