Capital Controls and Misallocation in the Market for Risk: Bank Lending Channel

Abstract

Foreign currency debt has led to many crises in emerging markets. However, in the past decade, firms in emerging economies have drastically increased their foreign currency borrowing, making them significantly exposed to depreciation shocks. To reduce their exposure to external shocks, central banks have increased their use of capital controls. In this paper I study whether capital controls can have the unintended consequence of inducing firms to borrow more in foreign currency. I exploit heterogeneity in the strictness of capital controls across Peruvian banks to provide novel causal evidence of the effect of capital controls on local firms' dollar borrowing from banks. Using a unique dataset that includes all foreign exchange transactions and loans given by Peruvian banks, I find that capital controls encourage firms to take more foreign currency loans. I describe a new mechanism to explain these findings, in which capital controls induce local banks to shift exchange rate exposure away from foreigners and onto domestic firms. This is worrisome as the literature shows that depreciation shocks have led to significant reductions in investment and employment for these firms.