Currency mismatch, systemic risk and growth in emerging Europe

Currency mismatch is a vehicle that exposes the economy to systemic risk, but it is also an engine of growth. We analyse this dual role at the macro and the micro levels. At the aggregate level, we construct a new measure of currency mismatch in the banking sector that controls for bank lending to unhedged borrowers – that is, those with no foreign currency income. Using our measure, we find that across emerging European economies, increases in currency mismatch are associated with higher growth in tranquil times, but also with more severe crises. On net, after taking into account the crisis period, we find a positive link between currency mismatch and growth. These results are also confirmed for a broader sample of emerging economies. In our firm-level analysis, we find that in emerging Europe, currency mismatch relaxes borrowing constraints, reduces interest rates and enhances growth across sets of firms that arguably are the most credit constrained – that is, small firms in non-tradables sectors – but not across large firms. An advantage of our approach is that it considers both listed and non-listed firms, and so we are able to effectively capture the effects of currency mismatch across the entire economy, not just the financially privileged stock market listed firms.

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