Firms, do you know your currency risk exposure? Survey results

Abstract

This paper surveys the currency risk management practices of Swiss industrial corporations. We find that industrials are unable to quantify their currency risk exposure and investigate possible reasons. One possibility is that firms do not think that they need to know because they use on-balance-sheet instruments to protect themselves before and after currency rates reach troublesome levels. This is puzzling because performing a rough estimate of at least the exposure of cash flows is not prohibitive and could be valuable. Another puzzling finding is that firms use currency derivatives to hedge/insure individual short-term transactions, without apparently trying to estimate aggregate transaction exposure.