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We present a model that accounts for the “mystery of original sin”, and the surge in local currency borrowing by emerging economies in the recent decade. We quantitatively investigate the currency composition of sovereign debt in the presence of two types of limited enforcement frictions arising from a government’s monetary and debt policy: strategic currency debasement and default on sovereign debt. Local currency debt obligations act as a better consumption hedge against income shocks than foreign currency debt because their real value can be affected by monetary policy. However, this provides a government with more temptation to deviate from disciplined monetary policy, thus restricting borrowing in local currency more than in foreign currency. Our model predicts that a country with less credible monetary policy borrows mainly in foreign currency as a substitute for monetary credibility. An important extension demonstrates that in the presence of an expectational Phillips curve, local currency debt improves the ability of monetary policymakers to commit. 

We reexamine the time-series evidence on uncovered interest rate parity for the U.S. dollar versus major currencies at short-, medium- and long-horizons. The evidence that interest rate differentials predict foreign exchange returns is not stable over time and disappears altogether when interest rates are near the zero-lower bound. However, we find that year-on-year inflation rate differentials predict excess returns – when the U.S. y.o.y. inflation rate is relatively high, subsequent returns on U.S. deposits tend to be high. We interpret this as consistent with the hypothesis that markets underreact initially to predictable changes in future monetary policy. The predictive power of y.o.y. inflation begins in the mid-1980s when central banks began to target inflation consistently and continues in the post-ZLB period when interest rates lose their primacy as a policy instrument. We attempt to address some econometric problems that might bias the conventional Fama (1984) test.