Dollarisation waves: new evidence from a comprehensive international bond database

We investigate how the US dollar’s prominence in the denomination of international debt securities has evolved in recent decades, using a comprehensive global data set with far more extensive coverage than data sets used in prior literature. We find no monotonic dollarisation or de-dollarisation trend; instead, the dollar’s share exhibits a wavelike pattern. We document three dollarisation waves since the 1960s. The …