The Benefit of Inflation-Indexed Debt: Evidence from an Emerging Bond Market

Author(s): Cristhian Hernando Ruiz Cardozo and Jens Henrik Eggert Christensen

Portfolio diversification is as important to debt management as it is to asset management. In this paper, we focus on diversification of sovereign debt issuance through greater reliance on inflation-indexed bonds for a representative emerging economy, Colombia. Using an arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model of fixed-coupon and inflation-indexed bond prices, we account for inflation and liquidity risk premia and calculate the net benefit of issuing inflation-indexed bonds over nominal bonds. Our results suggest that the Colombian government could lower its funding costs by as much as 0.69 percent by increasing its issuance of inflation-indexed debt, in particular at long maturities.

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Article Citation

Cardozo, Cristhian Hernando Ruiz, and Jens Henrik Eggert Christensen. 2023. "The Benefit of Inflation-Indexed Debt: Evidence from an Emerging Bond Market," Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2023-04. Available at https://doi.org/10.24148/wp2023-04