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Drawing upon underinvestment theory and clientele effect hypothesis, this paper aims to examine the effects of foreign currency (forex) exposure and Shari’ah-compliant status on firms’ financial hedging strategy.

Based on data of 250 nonfinancial firms listed on Bursa Malaysia from 2010 to 2018 (2,250 firm-year observations), the authors test the impact of forex exposure based on a vector of foreign-denominated cash flows (FCF) indicators and firms’ Sharīʿah-compliant status on two proxies of financial hedging decisions, namely, the ratio of the notional value of currency derivatives to total assets and a binomial measure of hedging status. The hedging decision models are estimated using panel logistic regression and system generalized method of moments.

The results indicate significant positive effects of the forex exposure indicators on firms’ propensity to hedge. However, the impact of forex exposure is most prevalent via total FCF. The results also reveal significant positive effects of Sharīʿah-compliant status on firms’ propensity to hedge but its negative impacts on the value of currency derivatives they use. The results suggest that Sharīʿah-compliant firms refrain from engaging in currency derivatives to avoid riba’ and subsequently subdue the clientele effect. However, when the forex exposure reaches higher levels, engagement in currency derivatives becomes a matter of tentative necessity (dharurat).

This study relies exclusively on the disclosure of foreign currency risk and management data in the annual reports of listed companies. Consequently, this limits the sample size to only those nonfinancial listed companies with complete data for the study period. Also, since none of the companies reports using Sharīʿah-compliant derivatives, the authors thus assume that they use derivative instruments that tolerate “riba.”

Given the significance of forex exposure on hedging decisions, the accounting profession must strictly adopt FRS 7 and FRS 139 for all listed firms to avoid market scrutiny and sustain their clientele. The results also call for the Islamic market regulators to include mandatory disclosure of conventional currency derivatives in screening firms for clearly prohibited activities to help enhance the credibility of its Islamic financial market.

Due to difficulty accessing relevant cash flow data, the study is among the few studies that measure forex exposure using FCF and test more proxy indicators. This study is perhaps the first to examine the Shari’ah perspective on currency derivatives in corporate forex risk management.

Exposure risk managers can hedge exchange rate risk with either currency futures or currency options. It is generally suggested that hedgers should choose a hedge instrument that matches the risk profile of the underlying currency position as closely as possible. This advice, however, ignores the possibility that the hedging effectiveness may differ for the alternate risk management tools. This study compares the effectiveness of currency futures and currency options as hedging instruments for covered and uncovered currency positions. Based on Ederington's portfolio theory of hedging, the results show that currency futures provide the more effective covered hedge, while currency options (used to construct a synthetic futures contract) are more effective for an uncovered hedge. Hence, exposure risk managers do not have to sacrifice hedging effectiveness to obtain the desired risk profile. Corporations engaged in international business transactions are commonly exposed to exchange rate risk. Since management is concerned with currency exposure, it can hedge the anticipated exchange rate risk either with futures or options. The choice of the appropriate hedging tool is generally influenced by the type of currency exposure (transaction, translation, or economic risk), the size of the firm, the industry effect, the risk preference of the manager or the firm and his/her familiarity with the available financial instruments and techniques. It is also suggested that a hedger should choose a hedge instrument that matches the risk profile of the underlying currency position as closely as possible. Hence, futures contracts are more suitable for covered hedges, while option contracts are best used for uncovered hedges. Hedging effectiveness of these two hedge instruments must be considered as well in order to evaluate the cost of obtaining the desired risk profile. Some empirical research has shown that the futures contract provides both an appropriate risk profile and a more effective hedge than an options contract for covered positions. If these findings also hold for uncovered currency positions, then the hedging decision involves a trade‐off between the desired risk profile and hedging effectiveness. That is, a hedger would have to decide whether the extra risk protection afforded by the attractive risk profile of options is worth the loss in hedging performance. This study compares the hedging effectiveness of currency futures and currency options for both covered and uncovered positions. Ederington's risk‐minimizing approach is applied to estimate the hedging effectiveness and the least risk hedge ratios which, in turn, are used to assess the trade‐off between risk profile and hedging performance.

Theoretical studies suggest that hedging helps firms to reduce their financial distress costs and underinvestment problem especially if the markets are imperfect. Hence hedging, through the use of currency derivatives, is one of the important financial policies for firms. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the determinants of derivatives usage by Indian firms using financial disclosures on currency derivatives by non-financial constituents of S&P CNX 500 for 2009.

We manually collect the data on foreign currency derivatives from firms’ annual reports for 2009 and then follow Haushalter’s (2000) approach to examine the determinants of firms’ decision to hedge. A firm can make its hedging decision at once, deciding whether to hedge and how much to hedge. Given the nature of dependent variable that is censored, it is appropriate to use Tobit regression. A firm can also decide its hedging decision in two steps by deciding first on whether to hedge and later how much to hedge. The former is modelled by probit regression and later by conditional regression.

Our empirical evidence suggests that forwards are the main instruments for managing currency risk followed by options and swaps. The objectives, in the order of priority, are reduction in exposure associated with foreign currency receivables, foreign currency long-term loans and foreign currency payables. Firm’s decision to hedge is positively related to size, foreign exchange exposure and leverage, while negatively related to liquidity and investment opportunities. We find evidence of higher derivative usage by firms with both higher currency risk and higher financial distress costs.

The findings of this paper will help corporates, researchers and regulators to understand firms’ motives behind hedging.

This is the first empirical study that examines the determinants of firm’s decision to hedge and the extent of hedging in the context of emerging economies like India.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the benefits of international equity portfolios from the viewpoint of Polish investors.

Eight national stock markets are included in the sample and three different portfolio forming strategies – Equally‐Weighted Portfolio (EWP), Minimum Variance Portfolio (MVP) and Tangency Portfolio (TP) – are adopted to construct the international diversified portfolios. In order to reveal the impact of currency hedging, the performance of a non‐hedged versus a fully‐hedged strategy is estimated. Finally, for comparison purpose, performances of the international portfolios from US investors' perspective are also examined.

Using monthly data from 1999 to 2008, the results show that from an ex post basis, an equally‐weighted global portfolio offers risk reduction opportunities for Polish investors and performance improvement potentials for US investors. In addition, US investors seem to fare better leaving their foreign investment unhedged, while Polish investors benefit from currency hedging. However, ex ante analysis reveals that when short‐selling is allowed, TP outperforms other portfolios and the risk‐adjusted portfolio performance could be enhanced by currency hedging.

In summary, the ex post analysis suggests that global portfolio either reduces risk or improves return. Compared to the domestic portfolio, the international portfolio reduces the portfolio risk while maintaining certain level of portfolio return for Polish investors who experience unusual high volatility in domestic market. On the other hand, an international portfolio yields higher portfolio return with similar risk level, as compared to the domestic portfolio, for US investors who suffer losses in the domestic market. A full currency hedging strategy benefits Polish but not US investors. Hedging or not, the risk of the local stock market is the major contributor to the risk of the equally‐weighted portfolio for both Polish and US investors.

Supply chain risks significantly endanger small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME‐) suppliers in different currency areas in purchasing and sales. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to describe the concept of natural hedging in supply chains, and to highlight the potentials of natural hedging as a risk prophylaxis and a supplier financing approach.

The paper uses a brief literature review and a conceptual research design, taking the financial and physical component of natural hedging (in this case between an OEM and its SME‐suppliers in the automotive industry) into consideration.

Natural hedging of currency and commodity price fluctuations can contribute to the reduction of SME‐suppliers' supply chain vulnerability, also benefiting an OEM.

This research focuses exclusively on relationships between SME‐suppliers and large OEMs in the automotive industry. Studies of other types of companies and industries, such as the capital goods industry, might reveal divergent practices.

With the natural hedging approach, the paper promotes an innovative concept for better managing risks in supply chains, especially in recessionary times. The concept is a source for supplier financing.

This research shows that a globally active focal firm – an OEM in the automotive industry, for instance – can hedge currency and commodity price risks (financial components), as well as operational supply risks (physical components), by centralizing commodity supply with its SME‐suppliers. It can serve as a basis for future research.

Corporate treasurers manage the currency risk of their organization by hedging through futures contracts. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of hedging by US currency futures contracts by taking into account the efficiency of the currency market.

The static models for calculating hedge ratio are as popular as dynamic models. But the main disadvantage with the static models is that they do not consider important properties of time series like autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity of the residuals and also ignore the cointegration of the market variables which indicate short-run market disequilibrium. The present study, therefore, measures the hedging effectiveness in the US currency futures market using two dynamic models – constant conditional correlation multivariate generalized ARCH (CCC-MGARCH) and dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH (DCC-MGARCH).

The study finds that both the dynamic models used in the study provide similar results. The relative comparison of CCC-MGARCH and DCC-MGARCH models shows that CCC-MGARCH provides better hedging effectiveness result, and thus, should be preferred over the other model.

The findings of the study are important for the company treasurers since the new updated Indian accounting standards (Ind-AS), applicable from the financial year 2016–2017, make it mandatory for the companies to evaluate the effectiveness of hedges. These standards do not specify a quantitative method of evaluation but provide the flexibility to the companies in choosing an appropriate method which justifies their risk management objective. These results are also useful for the policy makers as they can specify and list the appropriate methods for evaluating the hedge effectiveness in the currency market.

Majorly, the studies on Indian financial market limit themselves to either examining the efficiency of that market or to evaluate the effectiveness of the hedges undertaken. Moreover, most of such works focus on the stock market or the commodity market in India. This is one of the first studies which bring together the concepts of efficiency of the market and effectiveness of the hedges in the Indian currency futures market.

This paper aims to investigate the efficiency of different hedging strategies for an investor holding a portfolio of foreign currency bonds.

The simplest strategies of no hedge and fully hedged are compared with the more sophisticated strategies of the ordinary least squares (OLS) approach and the optimal hedge ratios found by the dynamic conditional correlation-generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity approach.

The sophisticated hedging strategies are found to be superior to the simple strategies because they lower the portfolio risk in domestic currency terms and improve the Sharpe ratios for multi-asset portfolios. The analyses also show that both the OLS and dynamic hedging strategies imply holding a limited carry position by being long in high-yielding currencies but short in low-yielding currencies.

The performance of multi-currency portfolios is examined using more realistic assumptions than in the previous literature, including a weekly frequency and a constraint of no short selling. Furthermore, carry trades are shown to be part of an optimal portfolio.

Using hedging theories, we analyse the variables that determine the decision to hedge with foreign currency debt.

Using a sample of 100 Spanish companies with a significant social and economic role in Latin American during 2004‐2007, we estimated probit models for panel data.

Our results showed that the main determinants are scale economies and the use of derivatives. On the one hand, we found that this hedging is positively related to tax loss carry‐forwards and long‐term economic sectors, and on the other, that it is related negatively to information asymmetries and growth opportunities. Results were mixed for foreign currency exposure.

The limitations of this paper are associated to the availability of information from annual reports and the SABI database, especially the variables in relation to operational hedging. Therefore, as a future line of research, we propose gathering of data on these internal hedging practices in order to obtain more accurate evidence about its use in companies and their relationship with financial hedging.

This paper makes three major contributions to the existing literature. First, it contributes by illustrating currency hedging practices used by Spanish firms – which are important in Latin markets – to manage exchange rate exposure in. Second, we used more variables for the empirical analyses to contrast the hedging theories than previous studies had. Finally, we used a data panel because it allows the control of unobservable heterogeneity and endogeneity problems. Previous studies only used cross‐section estimations.

Este trabajo analiza la cobertura cambiaria con deuda en divisa utilizando las teorías de cobertura.

Se estimaron modelos probit para datos de panel usando una muestra de 100 empresas españolas con un papel económico‐social relevante en Latinoamérica durante el período 2004‐2007.

Los resultados muestran que esta cobertura se relaciona principalmente con las economías de escala y el uso de derivados. Asimismo, existe una relación positiva con la convexidad impositiva y la localización empresarial en sectores orientados al largo plazo, y negativa con las asimetrías informativas y oportunidades de crecimiento. No existe evidencia concluyente para la exposición cambiaria.

La investigación tuvo como limitación la disponibilidad de algunos datos en los informes anuales de las empresas y la base de datos SABI, en especial, aquellos referidos a la cobertura operativa. En consecuencia, una línea de trabajo futura es la mejora de la información sobre esta cobertura, lo cual permitiría aportar mayor evidencia sobre su utilización y su relación con la cobertura financiera.

Esta investigación realiza tres contribuciones a la literatura existente: a) permite un mejor conocimiento de la cobertura cambiaria en empresas españolas internacionales que ejercen un papel relevante en los mercados latinoamericanos; b) utiliza un conjunto de variables más amplio para contrastar las teorías de cobertura que el aplicado en estudios precedentes; c) emplea la metodología de datos de panel y no estimaciones en sección cruzada como presentan los trabajos previos, lo cual permite controlar la heterogeneidad inobservable y posibles problemas de endogeneidad.

This study seeks to examine the effectiveness of controlling the currency risk for international diversified mixed‐asset portfolios via two different hedge instruments, currency forwards and currency options. So far, currency forward has been the most common hedge tool, which will be compared here with currency options to control the foreign currency exposure risk. In this regard, several hedging strategies are evaluated and compared with one another.

Owing to the highly skewed return distributions of options, the application of the traditional mean‐variance framework for portfolio optimization is doubtful. To account for this problem, a mean lower partial moment model is employed. An in‐the‐sample as well as an out‐of‐the sample context is used. With in‐sample analyses, a block bootstrap test has been used to statistically test the existence of any significant performance improvement. Following that, to investigate the consistency of the results, the out‐of‐sample evaluation has been checked. In addition, currency trends are also taken into account to test the time‐trend dependence of currency movements and, therefore, the relative potential gains of risk‐controlling strategies.

Results show that European put‐in‐the‐money options have the potential to substitute the optimally forward‐hedged portfolios. Considering the composition of the portfolio in using in‐the‐money options and forwards shows that using any of these hedge tools brings a much more diversified selection of stock and bond markets than no hedging strategy. The optimal option weights imply that a put‐in‐the‐money option strategy is more active than at‐the‐money or out‐of‐the‐money put options, which implies the dependency of put strategies on the level of strike price. A very interesting point is that, just by dedicating a very small part of the investment in options, the same amount of currency risk exposure can be hedged as when one uses the optimal forward hedging. In the out‐of‐sample study, the optimally forward‐hedged strategy generally presents a much better performance than any types of put policies.

The research shows the risk and return implications of different currency hedging strategies. The finding could be of interest for asset managers of internationally diversified portfolios.

Considering the findings in the out‐of‐sample perspective, the optimally forward‐hedged minimum risk portfolio dominates all other strategies, while, in the depreciation of the local currency, this, together with the forward‐hedged tangency portfolio selection, would characterize the dominant portfolio strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine currency swaps as an effective hedging technique for individual asset performance in today’s global real estate market, by considering hypothetical prime office investments across six different cities and five currency pairs. The perspective of a risk-averse, high net worth, non-institutional, smaller-scale Swiss investor is paired with investors from five additional national markets.

The study examines currency swaps in key office markets across three continents (Frankfurt, London, New York, Sydney, Warsaw and Zurich) and extends previous work on the topic by adopting both Monte Carlo (MC) and Latin Hypercube (LH) techniques to create stochastic samples for individual asset performance analyses. This is the first paper to apply LH sampling to currency swaps with underlying real estate assets, and the validity of this method is compared with that of MC. Four models are presented: the experience of the domestic investor (no exchange rate (ER) fluctuations); an unhedged direct foreign investment; hedging rental income and initial purchase price via a currency swap; and hedging rental income and anticipated terminal value.

The efficacy of a swap depends on the historical framework of the ERs. If the foreign currency depreciates against the domestic one, hedging the repatriated cash flow of a property investment proved superior to the unhedged strategy (EUR, GBP, PLN and USD to the CHF). An investor would benefit from exposure to an appreciating foreign currency (CHF to the EUR, GBP, PLN and USD), with an unhedged strategy clearly outperforming the currency swap as well as the domestic investor’s performance, while a historically sideways fluctuating ER (AUD to the CHF) also favours an unhedged approach. In all scenarios, unexpected economic or market shocks could cause negative consequences on the repatriated proceeds.

This research is of interest to small-scale, non-institutional investors aiming to develop strategies for currency risk mitigation in international investments for individual assets; however, tax-optimising strategies and the implications on a larger portfolio have not been taken into account.

There is no recent academic work on the efficacy of currency swaps in today’s global office market, nor has the position of smaller-scale high net worth investors received much academic attention. This research revisits the discussion on their validity, providing contemporary insight into the performance of six markets using LH as an alternative and original sampling technique.