nonlinear effects of exchange rate volatility on the volume of bilateral exports in this paper we investigate empirically the impact of exchange rate volatility on real international trade flows utilizing a 13 country data set of monthly bilateral real exports for 1980 1998 we compute one month ahead exchange rate volatility from the intra monthly variations in the exchange rate to better quantify this latent variable we find that the effect of exchange rate volatility on trade flows is nonlinear depending on its interaction with the importing country s volatility of economic activity and that it varies considerably over the set of country pairs considered copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

endogenous export prices and the taiwan us trade imbalance to explain the perplexing issue of why taiwan s trade imbalance with the us has persisted despite the depreciation of the dollar we estimate a four equation model to determine the direct pass through dpt and indirect cost adjustment ica effects of exchange rate changes on taiwan s export prices the ica effect is important in the case of taiwan because it imports mostly intermediate goods for the production of manufactured goods that are exported our findings support the view that dpt and ica effects reduce the effectiveness of exchange rate as a mechanism for international trade adjustment

real exchange rate volatility and economic openness theory and evidence this paper relates the volatility of the trade weighted effective real exchange rate to the degree of trade openness of an economy the theoretical part presents an intertemporal monetary model of a small open economy with nominal rigidities both monetary and aggregate supply shocks are shown to produce ceteris paribus smaller real exchange rate movements if the country is more open to foreign trade empirical evidence on a cross section of forty eight countries confirms this relationship differences in trade openness explain a large part of the cross country variation in the volatility of the effective real exchange rate

u s bilateral trade flows and exchange risk during the floating period abstract this paper tests for real exchange rate risk effects on u s bilateral trade flows during the floating period using several new as well as previously used risk measures significant negative effects occur in five of six u s import flows and in two of six u s export flows with one export flow showing a significant positive effect these results are consistent with several previous findings for aggregate u s trade two risk measures using the forward exchange rate and assuming a time varying risk premium provide marginally more significant results than the others

secular and cyclical responses of u s trade to income an evaluation of traditional models in the three decades since guy orcutt s 1950 classic paper evaluating empirical research on international trade flows most trade research has focused on the influence of prices in the decade since the benchmark study by houthakker and magee 1969 examination of the role of prices has accelerated although income is consistently the most significant explanatory variable in these studies it is typically introduced only as a background control variable rather than as a variable of central interest the few explicit studies of the link from income to trade either use proxies such as delivery lags and inventory ratios to investigate the dynamics of the link e g gregory 1971 and artus 1973 or decompose income into trend deviation from trend and in one instance change in deviation from trend in an attempt to separate the secular and business cycle components e g ball eaton and steuer 1966 khan and ross 1975 and dunlevy 1980 stephen magee 1975 pp 188 193 211 214 provides a persuasive rationale for at least the spirit of the second line of research arguing that trade flows respond differently to secular and business cycle income changes and that regression estimates with income in level form mix these effects time domain decomposition is now an established practice with the trend response identified with secular forces like comparative advantage hence could be positive or negative in either demand or supply the deviation from trend response with a business cycle keynesian mechanism hence is likely to be positive in demand and negative in supply and the change in deviation from trend response with a sneed of adjustment constraint hence is likely to be negative the most recent evidence bearing on these issues is provided by dunlevy 1980 who finds that the effect of the business cycle income proxy deviation fromtrend income on the supply of exports for the united states and the united kingdom is positive rather than negative evidence contradicting both theory and evidence in earlier capacity pressure studies in this paper we first evaluate traditional regression estimates of income elasticities of demand and supply for u s imports and exports from 1955 to 1979 then compare these estimates to cross spectral estimates of the secular and business cycle responses of trade to income the spectral technique is used because by definition the approach estimates separately the secular and business cycle links between trade and income if the response of trade to movements in income does differ over cycles regression estimates of income elasticities may reflect bias and instability due to cycle varying parameters regression elasticity estimates with income in trend and deviation from trend forms do provide separate estimates but the decomposition is useful only to the degree that the two variables are accurate proxies for secular and business cycle movements in income it should be emphasized that we are not using spectral analysis to detect lead lag properties since these are more directly obtained in the time domain and are relatively trivial for our sample the unique advantage of spectral analysis is that it isolates secular and business cycle components directly even when the time domain link is only contemporaneous the paper is organized as follows section ii presents and evaluates time domain estimates of standard demand and supply equations for u s imports and exports and presents caveats regarding interpretation of the trend and deviationfrom trend income variables section iii proreceived for publication march 4 1981 revision accepted for publication may 12 1982 university of oregon an earlier draft of this paper was presented at the fall 1980 north american meeting of the econometric society we acknowledge helpful comments from s y kwack john mutti and two anonymous referees we also thank john pippenger for supplying the spectral program specx68 and the university of oregon for a faculty research grant remaining errors are solely ours i application of spectral methods to investigate trade income links was first suggested by ball eaton and steuer 1966 p 503 they were unable to use the technique however because the data series available at that time were too short

the causal effect of income on health evidence from german reunification we investigate whether there was a causal effect of income changes on the health satisfaction of east and west germans in the years following reunification our data source is the german socio economic panel gsoep between 1984 and 2002 and we fit a recently proposed fixed effects ordinal estimator to our health measures and use a causal decomposition technique to account for panel attrition we find evidence of a significant positive effect of income changes on health satisfaction but the quantitative size of this effect is small this is the case with respect to current income and a measure of permanent income

exchange rate volatility and foreign trade evidence from thirteen ldc s this article investigates empirically the impact of real exchange rate volatility on the export flows of 13 less developed countries ldc s over the quarterly period 1973 1996 estimates of the cointegrating relations are obtained using johansen s multivariate procedure estimates of the short run dynamics are obtained for each country using the error correction technique the major results show that increases in the volatility of the real effective exchange rate approximating exchange rate uncertainty exert a significant negative effect on export demand in both the short run and the long run in each of the 13 ldc s these effects may result in significant reallocation of resources by market participants

exchange rate volatility and japan u s commodity trade an asymmetry analysis exchange rate volatility is said to affect trade flows in either direction when increased volatility is separated from decreased volatility asymmetric analysis reveals even more support for the fact that both increased volatility and decreased volatility affect trade flows in either direction we add to this new literature by considering 57 industries that trade between japan and the us in addition to providing evidence of asymmetric response of their trade flows to a measure of exchange rate volatility our approach identifies industries that could benefit from increased exchange rate volatility and those that could be hurt similarly we identify industries that could benefit from decreased volatility and those that could be hurt the overall conclusion is the adverse effects of dollar yen volatility on the trade between the two countries

exchange rate volatility and aggregate export growth in bangladesh the long and short run determinants of bangladeshi export growth are examined these are modelled as depending on world trade volume bangladeshi and world export prices and exchange rate volatility several techniques are used to estimate and test hypotheses about the cointegration space of these variables we find that there are two plausible restricted cointegrating vectors one appears to be an export demand while the other is suggestive of an export supply these are then imposed on an error correction model estimates suggest that in the long run bangladeshi export growth is driven by the volume of world trade and is negatively and inelastically related to the volatility of bangladeshi exchange rates once these long run effects are accounted for it is found that none of the variables significantly explains any short run changes in export growth

estimating the effect of income on health and mortality using lottery prizes as an exogenous source of variation in income a vast literature has established a strong positive relation between income and health status and a negative relation with mortality this paper studies the effects of income on health and mortality using only the part of income variation due to a truly exogenous factor monetary lottery prizes of individuals the findings are that higher income causally generates good health and that this effect is of a similar magnitude as when traditional estimation techniques are used a 10 percent income increase improves health by about 4 5 percent of a standard deviation

exchange rate volatility international trade and resource allocation a perspective on recent research abstract recent research on the effects of exchange rate volatility is discussed and directions for future research are explored the need to pay more attention to the effects of diversification and firms characteristic is emphasized it is suggested that while international risk has risen substantially since floating the differential between international and domestic risk may not this could help explain the failure of international trade to fall drastically and suggests that exchange rate volatility has been more a reflection than an independent cause of underlying instability

long run price elasticities and the marshall lerner condition revisited abstract in estimating trade elasticities most previous researchers employed nonstationary data and ols or 2sls method with new developments in the literature this paper uses stationary data and johansen s cointegration analysis to provide new trade elasticities for almost 30 countries

payments settlement tiering in private and public systems what are the benefits provided by a payment system what are the trade offs in public versus private payment systems and in restricted versus open payments arrangements modern payment systems encompass a variety of institutional designs with varying degrees of counterparty protection we develop a framework that allows for an examination and comparison of payment systems and specification of conditions leading to their adoption we relate these conditions to the design of present large value payment systems fedwire chips target etc

impact of the terms of trade on the u s trade balance a reexamination the right conclusion could be that there is a strong connection between the spectral components with specified periods a possible economic interpretation could identify a strong long term in the sense of the specified periods connection between both series but that would still not allow us to say anything concerning the size and direction of the time delay between the two series for such an analysis we would have to at least consider the phase angles between the components because of the ambivalent meaning of the phase angle in relation to the direction and number of periods the final answer could come only from the time domain analysis however the fact that only spectral components with longer periods i e smaller frequencies show coherency suggests something else in order to influence the balance of trade the changes in the terms of trade should be durable enough mathematical formalization of this concept of durability would therefore be helpful i would propose that further research be done in this respect

exploring the health wealth nexus the causal links between health and economic resources have long concerned social scientists we use four waves of data from the panel study of income dynamics psid to analyze the impact of wealth upon an individual s health status the difficulty in approaching this task that has bedeviled previous studies is that wealth may be endogenous a priori it is just as likely that changes in health affect wealth as vice versa we argue that inheritance is a suitable instrument for the change in wealth and implement a straightforward instrumental variables strategy to deal with this problem our results suggest that the causal relationship running from wealth to health may not be as strong as first appears in the data wealth exerts a positive and statistically significant effect on health status but it is very small in magnitude instrumental variables estimation leaves the point estimate approximately the same but renders it insignificantly different from zero and even when the point estimate is increased by twice its standard error s e the quantitative effect is small we conclude that the wealth health connection is not driven by short run changes in wealth

the impact of exchange rate volatility on international trade reduced form estimates using the garch in mean model abstract in this paper we use a multivariate garch in mean model of the reduced form of multilateral exports to examine the relationship between nominal exchange rate volatility and export flows and prices the model imposes rationality on perceived exchange rate volatility unlike conventional two step strategies tests are performed for five industrialized countries over the post bretton woods era we find that the garch conditional variance has a statistically significant impact on the reduced form equations for all countries for most of the countries the magnitude of the effect is stronger for export prices than quantities in addition the estimated magnitude of the impact of volatility on exports is not robust to using the conventional estimation strategy jel f41 f31

exchange rate uncertainty and agricultural trade using a sample of bilateral trade flows across ten developed countries between 1974 and 1995 this article explores the effect of exchange rate uncertainty on the growth of agricultural trade as compared to other sectors based on a gravity model that controls for other factors likely to determine bilateral trade the results show that real exchange rate uncertainty has had a significant negative effect on agricultural trade over this period moreover the negative impact of uncertainty on agricultural trade has been more significant compared to other sectors

a model of tiered settlement networks this paper develops a model of settlement system to study the endogenous structure of settlement networks and the welfare consequences of clearing agent failure the equilibrium degree of tiering is endogenously determined by the cost structure and the information structure the degree of tiering is decreasing in the fixed cost of operating the second tier network and the availability of public credit history furthermore the welfare effects of clearing agent failure can be decomposed into operational inefficiency and the loss of private information

the impacts of exchange rate volatility on vegetable trade flows trade flows of commodities are generally affected by the principles of comparative advantage in a free trade however trade flows might be enhanced or distorted not only by various government interventions but also by exchange rate fluctuations among others this study applies a commodity specific gravity model to selected vegetable trade flows among organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries to determine the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the trade flows using the data from 1996 to 2002 the results show that while the exchange rate uncertainty significantly reduces trade in the majority of commodity flows there is evidence that both short and long term volatility have positive effect on trade flows of specific commodities this study also tests the regional preferential trade agreements such as the north american free trade agreement nafta the asia pacific economic cooperation apec and the eu and their different effects on commodities

inside and outside money as alternative media of exchange we study a random matching model of money in which a subset of people called bankers have known histories and the rest called nonbankers have unknown histories earlier we showed that if there are no outside assets then an optimal arrangement has bankers issuing objects banknotes that are used in trades involving nonbankers here the same model is used to compare such exclusive use of inside money to the exclusive use of outside money we show that the set of implementable outcomes using outside money is a strict subset of the set using inside money

exchange rate risk and u s agricultural trade flows this paper analyzes the effect of exchange rate risk on u s agricultural trade flows a model which incorporates exchange rate risk is applied to ten countries while exchange rate risk was not significant in the seven developed markets results indicate that the exchange rate variable adversely affected u s agricultural exports to the three developing countries used in the analysis these findings underscore the importance of exchange rate risk in developing countries trading behavior issues such as establishment of well developed financial and commodity markets in developing countries must be addressed in future research

dutch disease government policy and import demand in nigeria the effects of sectoral changes and government policies on import demand in nigeria are examined in the context of the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s a two equation model is estimated to determine real import demand and the real exchange rate the results show that import demand increased significantly in response to the boom induced squeeze on the agricultural sector furthermore by inducing and sustaining real exchange rate overvaluation expansionary government policies contributed to higher import demand even after the collapse in oil prices

exchange rate variation commodity price variation and the implications for international trade abstract a commonly cited disadvantage of floating exchange rates is that a fluctuating exchange rate reduces international trade when firm owners are risk averse risk averse firm owners are concerned with the variation in the real domestic currency price of the good they export or import this price variation depends on exchange rate variation but also on a good s foreign currency price variation domestic price level variation and the covariation between these three variables the empirical results presented here show that for many commodities floating exchange rates did not cause a significant increase in overall real domestic currency price variation

determinants of international trade flows the case of developing countries abstract the question of magnitude and the time path of the trade flows to changes in the exchange rates and to changes in the price level is of emitent practical importance to assess the above proposition a distributed lag structure is imposed on the relative prices and on the effective exchange rate as the determinants of trade flows then import and export demand functions are estimated for a sample of developing countries using the almon procedure the empirical findings appeared to sustain orcutt s early conjecture that trade flows adjust differently to different price stimuli more precisely it was found that imports and exports reactions were quicker and the total response time was shorter when an exchange rate rather than relative prices caused a change in international prices

estimating the effect of unearned income on labor supply earnings savings and consumption evidence from a survey of lottery players this paper provides empirical evidence about the effect of unearned income on earnings consumption and savings using an original survey of people playing the lottery in massachusetts in the mid 1980 s the effects of the magnitude of lottery prizes on economic behavior are analyzed the critical assumption is that among lottery winners the magnitude of the prize is randomly assigned it is found that unearned income reduces labor earnings with a marginal propensity to consume leisure of approximately 11 percent with larger effects for individuals between 55 and 65 years old after receiving about half their prize individuals saved about 16 percent

international trade and exchange rate volatility for currencies with well developed forward markets several papers have investigated the conjectured negative relationship between trade and short term exchange rate volatility without being very successful a theoretical explanation for the empirical anomalies is provided by solving explicitly for the forward rate because importers and exporters are on opposite sides of the forward market so is their exposure towards exchange rate volatility moreover which trade flow benefits and which one loses from increased volatility is determined by the signs of the aggregate net foreign currency exposure and the aggregate measure of risk aversion

trade liberalisation the peso and mexico s commodity trade flows with the united states abstract we assess the effects of real peso devaluations as well as the effects of gatt and nafta on mexico s in payments and out payments with the united states for 102 industries we find that relatively few trade flows are sensitive to changes in the real exchange rate probably due to production sharing and intra industry trade but devaluations affect mexican imports more than exports trade liberalisation has had a larger impact particularly on imports of intermediate goods and exports of certain manufactures many affected export industries are ones that have previously been shown to have economies of scale

exchange rate effects on the volume and variability of trade flows abstract this paper investigates the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the volume and variability of trade flows employing a signal extraction framework we show that the direction and magnitude of importers and exporters optimal trading activities depend upon the source of the uncertainty general microstructure shocks fundamental factors driving the exchange rate process or a noisy signal of policy innovations providing a rationale for the contradictory empirical evidence in the literature we also show that exchange rate uncertainty emanating from general microstructure shocks and the fundamental factors reduces the variability of trade flows while that related to a noisy signal of policy innovations increases variability

how sensitive are malaysia s bilateral trade flows to depreciation in an attempt to assess the impact of currency depreciation on the trade balance recent studies are employing disaggregated trade data to avoid aggregation bias however since import and export prices are not available at disaggregated level recent studies are using export and import values rather than their volumes so that they can establish direct relation between inpayments and the exchange rate as well as between outpayments and the exchange rate this study explores the experience of malaysia bilateral inpayments and outpayments models are estimated between malaysia and her 14 trading partners using quarterly data and bound testing approach to cointegration the results show that while real depreciation of the ringgit has short run effects in the long run it increases malaysia s inpayments from only five trading partners

does real exchange rate volatility affect sectoral trade flows this article investigates empirically the effect of real exchange rate volatility on sectoral bilateral trade flows between the united states and its top 13 trading partners our investigation also considers those effects on trade flows that may arise through changes in income volatility and the interaction between income and exchange rate volatilities we provide evidence that i exchange rate volatility does not systematically affect sectoral trade flows ii income volatility has little impact on trade flows and iii the effect of the interaction term on trade flows is opposite that of exchange rate volatility dampening its impact on trade flows

forward market and international trade many studies on hedging currency risk and international trade 6 14 18 17 have investigated the simultaneous hedging and production decisions with the nonstochastic home and foreign earnings assumption these studies derived a separation theorem which shows that the production decision made by a multinational firm for international trade is independent of the distribution of the exchange rate and dependent only on the forward price the separation theorem has two different implications first although the production decision is shown to depend on the forward price there is still a missing link connecting the trading activity in the forward markets with international trade second exchange rate uncertainty will not have an impact on the level on trade since the forward price can be used by multinational firms as a guide for the expected future spot rate the first implication seems to contradict results by britto 8 and telser 37 demonstrating that futures price has a real impact on resource allocation and production within an economy the second implication is inconsistent with a number of other empirical studies 2 11 12 22 29 that have shown exchange rate uncertainty has an adverse effect on trade and other studies 5 13 that have found exchange rate volatility to have a positive impact on trade although some studies 7 27 do recognize stochastic foreign income in the foreign hedging they ignore the two kinds of issues discussed above thus this paper attempts to investigate the simultaneous decisions for foreign exchange hedging and production under a stochastic assumption of foreign earnings a simple model is developed here to examine a the interaction of forward markets with international trade and b the impact of exchange risk on trade by endogenizing the forward price in a variety of scenarios this paper derives several interesting results under the stochastic foreign income scenario a new foreign exchange hedging rule which incorporates the covariability of foreign earnings and exchange risk is derived further we find that the separation theorem breaks down under such a situation interestingly we are able to show a positive linkage between trading activity in forward markets and export furthermore

the effects of real exchange rate risk on international trade abstract by assuming real profit maximization and uncertain prices as well as exchange rates we conclude that it is uncertain percentage changes in the real exchange rate that are risky in international trade empirical estimation of fourteen bilateral trade flows among industrialized countries finds a significant negative effect on trade quantity from such risk in a number of these cases the expectation variable has a positive effect in a larger number of cases significant price effects from the expectation variable are fewer and from risk are negligible

exchange rate volatility and the role of regional currency linkages the asean case as the economies of the association of southeast asian nations asean have moved towards closer economic ties and trade integration in recent years the establishment of exchange rate stability is becoming an important regional policy concern particularly in the wake of the asian currency crisis of 1997 this paper examines the exchange rate volatility of the currencies of indonesia malaysia philippines singapore and thailand between 1974 and 1999 using variance decomposition vdc methods and impulse response functions which are var related estimation techniques the study also investigates the regional currency linkages which may have played a role in transmitting exchange rate fluctuations the results indicate that in spite of the adoption of the crawling peg exchange regime following the breakup of the bretton woods system all of the five asean currencies experienced volatility with the indonesian rupiah posting the highest volatility level the switch to de facto pegging against the us dol

transferability finality and debt settlement abstract payment fundamental to exchange in a decentralized economy often takes the form of transfers of inside money i e specialized forms of debt associated with each type of inside money is a set of rules that governs both the legitimacy of such transfers as means of extinguishing other debts and the allocation of the ensuing risks in this paper we develop a model of debt as inside money in a simple mechanism design framework we show that transferable debt that can be used to settle other debt obligations with finality can be a welfare improving arrangement in the presence of limited enforcement powers transferable debt has two advantages over simple chains of credit it allows for removal of less than perfectly reliable agents from the chain in a timely fashion and it allows agents to direct payments to the proper party without direct communication with other members of the credit chain

sectoral effects of exchange rate volatility on united states exports abstract we analyze the effects of real exchange rate volatility on the proportions of bilateral exports of nine categories of goods from the united states to seven major industrial countries using a fixed effect framework in six of the nine categories the volatility of the real exchange rate significantly affects the value of exports and in five of these categories the effect is positive these results are consistent with a model in which risk neutral firms increase supply of elastically demanded exports in response to an increase in the volatility of the real exchange rate

impact of exchange rate uncertainty on trade flows evidence from commodity trade between the united states and the united kingdom previous studies that investigated the impact of exchange rate volatility on the trade flows employed aggregate trade data and standard estimation techniques they provided mixed results in this paper we use disaggregated import and export data for 177 commodities traded between the united states and the united kingdom to investigate whether volatility of the real bilateral dollar pound exchange rate has any detrimental effect on trade flows at the commodity level additionally we employ the bounds testing approach to cointegration and error correction modelling that is suitable for the models used mostly because it does not require pre unit root testing and variables in the model could be stationary non stationary or a combination of the two in most trade flow models estimated we found a negative effect of exchange rate volatility on commodity trade

noise a firm made trade barrier abstract a dominant domestic firm confronted by a fringe of risk averse importers achieves higher profits by adopting a volatile price policy than by setting quantity according to the standard marginal condition the fluctuating domestic price is equivalent to a tariff on imports for all intents and purposes the local firm raises its rivals costs

the effects of lottery prizes on winners and their neighbors evidence from the dutch postcode lottery each week the dutch postcode lottery pcl randomly selects a postal code and distributes cash and a new bmw to lottery participants in that code we study the effects of these shocks on lottery winners and their neighbors consistent with the life cycle hypothesis the effects on winners consumption are largely confined to cars and other durables consistent with the theory of in kind transfers the vast majority of bmw winners liquidate their bmws we do however detect substantial social effects of lottery winnings pcl nonparticipants who live next door to winners have significantly higher levels of car consumption than other nonparticipants

real exchange rate volatility and international trade a reexamination of the theory one of the issues that have received considerable attention in the comparison of the properties of alternative exchange rate regimes is the effect of exchange rate risk on the volume of trade it has been argued that the higher volatility of exchange rates witnessed since the adoption of the floating regime in 1973 has led to a decrease in international trade transactions this is because most trade contracts are not for immediate delivery of goods and since they are denominated in terms of the currency of either the importer or the exporter unanticipated fluctuations in the exchange rate affect realized profits and hence the volume of trade it is implicitly assumed that forward exchange markets that can help traders eliminate this type of variations in profits either are not available as it is true for the majority of currencies because most are not fully convertible thereby impairing forward markets or for some reason they are not utilized to fully hedge exchange risk present in trade transactions the empirical evidence regarding the effect of exchange rate risk on trade has at best been inconclusive the large majority of the empirical studies are unable to establish a systematically significant link between exchange rate variability and the volume of international trade whether on an aggregate or on a bilateral basis abrams 1 akhtar and hilton 2 cushman 4 5 6 and kenan and rodrik 12 find some significant negative effects of exchange volatility on exports however bailey tavlas and uhlan 3 hooper and kohlhagen 10 and an international monetary fund study 11 do not find any supporting evidence for the depressing effect of exchange rate volatility on international trade it is also interesting to note that in many of these studies a significant positive effect of exchange rate volatility on the volume of trade is found for some cases however the positive effect believed to be at odds with the theory was either ignored or dismissed as a perverse result since as far as volumes are concerned theoretical considerations

u s japanese bilateral trade and the yen dollar exchange rate an empirical analysis the united states has recently experienced unprecedented balance of trade deficits the merchandise trade deficit reached an all time high of over 61 billion in 1983 and for 1984 was 108 billion japan is often singled out as the major contributor to this deficit in 1984 roughly one third of the u s merchandise trade deficit and over one half of the u s manufacturing trade deficit was with japan moreover since shifts in trade balances are widely regarded as a function of changes in exchange rates there has been a tendency to focus on the general depreciation of the yen in terms of the dollar which began in 1978 in explaining the u s trade deficit this paper explores empirically the response of the u s japanese trade balance in manufacturing to movements in the yen dollar rate the analysis based on both structural and reduced form approaches provides a test of the conventional view that the weak yen has been a major factor explaining the japanese penetration into the u s manufacturing sector while japanese protectionism has effectively insulated japan s markets from u s competition our analysis does not support this view we find u s imports from japan essentially insensitive to exchange rate movements but u s exports to japan highly exchange rate elastic since u s manufacturing imports from japan dominate corresponding exports 58 billion to 8 billion in 1984 we conclude that even a sustained appreciation of the yen in terms of the dollar is unlikely to reduce significantly the u s manufacturing trade deficit in section ii of this paper we specify structural and reduced form models explaining u s bilateral manufacturing trade with japan in section iii we present and evaluate struc

the supply and demand for imports and exports in a simultaneous model previous studies on the behaviour of aggregate exports and imports have tended to ignore the simultaneous relationship between quantity and price this paper investigates the price responsiveness of export and import demand and supply in eight african countries the results indicate that export demand price elasticities are smaller when the sample is african the import supply and demand elasticities were found to be generally large the marshall lerner condition of balance of payment stability is found to be easily satisfied a positively sloped function of export supply is found to exist for a majority of countries in the sample the average time lag of export supply is found to be about a year the disequilibrium model is found to be more appropriate for import demand import supply and export supply

why is it so difficult to find an effect of exchange rate risk on trade abstract it is commonly argued that exchange rate risk hampers international trade however the large literature on this subject has not yet provided conclusive evidence this paper analyzes why it is so difficult to obtain a clear answer from time series analyses we use data on bilateral aggregate u s exports to the other g7 countries the results show that as far as the exchange rate is concerned export decisions are mostly affected by the probability distribution of the about one year ahead rate the riskiness of the exchange rate at such a long horizon appears fairly constant over time with only short term fluctuations this makes it difficult to discover the true effect of exchange rate risk on trade from the time series data that are typically available

the adjustment of canadian import demand to changes in income prices and exchange rates the paper provides estimates of the sensitivity of canadian import demand to changes in income prices and exchange rates the model specification allows for the con sideration of long run elasticities as well as the dynamics of short run adjustment of imports to changes in these variables the estimated long run elasticities obtained are similar to those in previous studies it is also shown that canadian imports react quickly to changes in either foreign or domestic prices but that the reaction to changes in exchange rates is much slower

unexpected windfalls education and mental health evidence from lottery winners in germany this paper investigates the causal impact of large unexpected windfalls on individual mental health physical health as well as health behaviors i use a large individual level panel data set of l

the effects of trade liberalization on imports in selected developing countries abstract this paper analyses the impact of the reduction of tariff and nontariff barriers on the imports of 22 selected developing countries utilizing dynamic panel data techniques domestic income and relative prices are found to be significant determinants of import growth in addition the results indicate that import duties reduce import growth but the effect varies according to the region and the type of trade policy regime existing in the country the results also show that the elimination of trade policy distortions has a strong positive impact on import growth finally it is found that income and price elasticities are higher as a result of trade policy reform

measuring and analysing the effects of short term volatility in real exchange rates this paper examines short term volatility in the real effective exchange rates of industrial countries and its impact on their imports it yields three conclusions first volatility has not diminished as markets have gained experience with floating exchange rates the trend appears to be in the opposite direction for some countries second exposure to short term volatility has differed among countries japan and sweden have experienced much more than most other industrial countries third volatility appears to depress the volume of international trade this third finding is consistent with results reported by cushman and by akhtar and hilton and challenges earlier findings by hooper and kohlhagen

does black market exchange rate volatility deter the trade flows iranian experience previous studies that investigated the impact of exchange rate volatility on the trade flows employed official exchange rate data to construct a measure of exchange rate uncertainty in this paper we show that in countries that there is a black market for foreign exchange the black market exchange rate volatility could have adverse effect on the trade flows we show this by using data from iran and cointegration analysis

taiwan s exports and trade imbalance against us and japan an empirical analysis the persistence of the bilateral trade surplus between taiwan and the usa and the bilateral trade deficit between taiwan and japan despite the significant appreciation or depreciation of the nt dollar during the early 1980s to the mid 1990s renewed interest to seek explanations for these phenomena to assess the above proposition a polynomial distributed lag pdl method is imposed on the impact of changes in the real exchange rate on the bilateral trade structure particularly export demand and trade imbalance between taiwan the usa and japan from 1981 to 1998 the empirical findings show that 1 the real income factors have important effects on the real exports in both cases 2 the real exchange rates and the real imports are not major determinants of the export demand from taiwan to the usa but they do play an important role on the real exports from taiwan to japan 3 the real exchange rate has significant effect on the real trade surplus with the usa and on trade deficit with japan but the real

how sensitive is commodity trade flows between us and india to currency depreciation previous studies that investigated the impact of real depreciation of the rupee on indian trade balance used aggregate trade data and provided no support for real depreciation to be effective in improving india s trade balance in this article we disaggregate the indian trade data by commodity and consider the sensitivity of each industry s inpayments export value and outpayments import value to real rupee dollar exchange rate annual data over the period of 1962 to 2004 from 40 industries that trade between the two countries as well as bounds testing approach are used to show that while in half of the industries real depreciation of rupee has short run effects on inpayments and outpayments the short run effects do not last into the long run in majority of the cases

real exchange rate volatility and the us bilateral trade a var approach this paper uses var models to investigate the impact of real exchange rate volatility on u s bilateral imports from the united kingdom france germany japan and canada the var systems include u s and foreign macro variables and are estimated separately for each country the major results suggest that the effect of volatility on imports is weak although permanent shocks to volatility do have a negative impact on this measure of trade and those effects are relatively more important over the flexible rate period copyright 1989 by mit press

us bilateral trade equations forecasts and structural stability in this paper actual recent us trade values are compared with out of sample forecasts using a standard specification for real bilateral trade value equations though fairly accurate on average there are large bilateral errors a battery of coefficient stability tests indicates significant instability more often for imports over the forecast period and more often for exports over the latter part of the estimation period thus standard bilateral trade equations appear to violate the basic regression assumption of stability and may be of little use for forecasting

exchange rate uncertainty and us bilateral fresh fruit and fresh vegetable trade an application of the gravity model in order to analyse the effect of exchange rate uncertainty we apply an empirical gravity equation to two sets of us bilateral trade data fresh fruit over the period 1976 1999 for a panel of 26 countries and fresh vegetables over the period 1976 2006 for a panel of nine countries based on panel estimation methods and using both a moving sd measure and the peree and steinherr 1989 measure of exchange rate uncertainty the results show that us bilateral fresh fruit trade has been negatively affected by exchange rate uncertainty we also find some evidence that the exchange rate between the us dollar and the currencies of latin american trading partners accounts for most of the negative impact of exchange rate uncertainty on bilateral trade flows in fresh fruit in contrast when using panel estimation methods and both measures of exchange rate uncertainty we find no statistically significant evidence for any negative effect of exchange rate uncertainty on us bilateral fresh vegetable trade however

exchange rate volatility and international trading strategy abstract it is usually argued that an increase in exchange rate volatility reduces the volume of international trade as trading firms are risk averse this paper shows that exporting firms benefit under fairly general conditions from an increase in exchange rate volatility firms optimally adjust their export volumes to the level of the exchange rate exporting is an option which is exercised if profitable in addition the paper presents conditions under which the volume of international trade grows with exchange rate volatility

bilateral trade elasticities this paper estimates income and price elasticities for bilateral world trade in addition to testing the properties of the error terms the dynamic specification and the assumption of parameter constancy the analysis presents the first application of the bank spectrum estimator to bilateral trade flows for all countries the paper finds that bilateral trade elasticities exhibit enough of a dispersion to suggest that the direction of trade is sensitive to changes in income and prices using the bilateral elasticities as raw data the analysis obtains the associated multilateral estimates and finds that they are both consistent with the literature and suitable to addressing questions involving multilateral trade but the evidence also reveals that sole reliance on multilateral elasticities conceals valuable information for both policy applications and empirical analyses of international trade copyright 1990 by mit press

taiwan s exports and trade imbalance against us and japan an empirical investigation based on error correction model this study employs recent advances in time series analysis cointegration and error correction model to examine the long run and short run determinants of the exports and trade imbalance between the usa japan and taiwan the unit root tests reveal nonstationary in most of the variables the cointegration tests affirm positive the long run associations are between the exchange rate changes and the exports as well as the trade imbalance once these long run effects are accounted for it is found that there are evidences of short run relationship between these variables

income and price elasticities for exports of developing countries income and price elasticities for non oil exports of non opec developing countries play an imp ortant role in the development of policy responses to the debt crisis these elasticities are estimated for the major standard internation al trade classification commodity groups based on two stage least sq uares and quarterly data for 1973 to 1984 the income elasticity for non oil exports ranges between 1 4 and 1 9 the analysis also tests t he properties of the error term the dynamic specification and para metric stability the sensitivity of the results is assessed using sh iller s lags and band spectrum estimation copyright 1988 by mit press

bilateral trade flows the linder hypothesis and exchange risk bilateral trade flows are used to examine the linder hypothesis and the effect of exchange rate variability in a gra vity type trade model derived from an underlying demand and supply mo del a behavioral model is used to justify examining these issues joi ntly the model performs well empirically using a sample of seventeen countries for the period 1974 82 the authors find overwhelming supp ort for the linder hypothesis and this version of the gravity model moreover they find strong support for the hypothesis that increased exchange rate variability affects bilateral trade flows copyright 1987 by mit press

u s bilateral trade balances and the dollar abstract u s bilateral export and import values with seven large trading partners are tested for real exchange rate effects over 1975 1985 the results suggest that dollar devaluation would have the most favorable impact on the u s trade balance in the case of japan and the least favorable in the case of canada

us indonesia trade at commodity level and the role of the exchange rate previous studies that assessed the impact of currency depreciation on inpayments and outpayments of indonesia with her major trading partners did not find much significant results especially in the trade with the united states we wonder whether insignificant link between the real rupiah dollar rate and indonesia s inpayments and outpayments with the united states is due to aggregation bias to answer this question we disaggregate the trade flows between the two countries by commodity and consider the sensitivity of inpayments of 108 us exporting industries and outpayments of 32 us importing industries from indonesia we find that most industries respond to exchange rate changes in the short run in the long run however 32 inpayments schedule and 17 outpayments schedule are significantly affected a 1 real depreciation of the dollar was found to improve us trade balance by 1 8

who wants a good reputation we examine a market in which long lived firms face a short term incentive to exert low effort but could earn higher profits if it were possible to commit to high effort there are two types of firms inept firms who can only exert low effort and competent firms who have a choice between high and low effort there is occasional exit and competent and inept potential entrants compete for the right to inherit the departing firm s reputation consumers receive noisy signals of effort choice and so competent firms choose high effort in an attempt to distinguish themselves from inept firms a competent firm is most likely to enter the market by purchasing an average reputation in the hopes of building it into a good reputation than either a very low reputation or a very high reputation inept firms in contrast find it more profitable to either buy high reputations and deplete them or buy low reputations

international financial volatility and commodity exports evidence from the thai agricultural sector using 1981 2006 data from the bank of thailand i estimate the effect of four measures of real exchange rate volatility on thai exports of five key agricultural commodities controlling for both the level of the real exchange rate and foreign incomes estimates of the effect of volatility on export volume are generally negative and often significant lending support to a range of theoretical models that predict such an effect no such relationship exists between lagged values of exchange rate volatility and agricultural production the range of results obtained using various measures of volatility suggests caution in comparing studies using different measures copyright 2010 oxford university press

exchange rate volatility and intra asia trade evidence by type of goods this paper examines the impact of intra asia exchange rate volatility on intra asia trade in primary goods intermediate goods equipment goods and consumption goods from 1980 to 2009 for asia the evidence shows that as intraregional exchange rate volatility increases intraregional exports in these goods fall this adverse impact is even more pronounced in the subregion of association of southeast asian nations asean 5 comprising asean member countries plus the people s republic of china hong kong china japan the republic of korea and taipei china and especially among intermediate and equipment exports again the impact magnifies in an even smaller subgroup excluding the smaller asean economies these results underline the significant impact of exchange rate volatility on the region s production networks for south asia however exchange rate volatility appears to have a positive impact on exports still caution is warranted given that south asian economies trade relatively little with each other

trade balance adjustment with imported intermediate goods the japanese case he purpose of this paper is to analyze the behavior of the japanese trade balance for the period of 1966 80 using a conventional elasticities approach however unlike previous works in this area our approach emphasizes the following key features of japan s foreign trade a almost all exports more than 95 in 1975 are manufactured goods b except for foods 15 2 of imports imports are either used as inputs in the manufacturing sector or manufactured goods which compete with home products consequently by concentrating on the behavior of the manufacturing sector we can explain most of the components of exports and imports in view of this we estimate a model of the manufacturing sector in which firms in the sector use imported fuels and raw materials as inputs and produce outputs sold in both foreign and domestic markets the demand for fuels and raw materials and the supplies of output or output prices in the domestic and foreign markets are all derived from a profit maximizing behavior of the manufacturing sector thus imports of fuels and raw materials are treated as derived demands the most important advantage of such an approach is that we shed light on interactions between domestic and foreign markets on the one hand and between exports and imports on the other this is in sharp contrast to the traditional demand for imports supply of exports approach which estimates each component of the trade balance separately another advantage of our approach is that on the exports side a simultaneous equation estimation method is adopted that is we estimate an export supply or export price equation as well as an export demand equation the importance of this method has been recognized by for example goldstein and khan 1978 these advantages of the approach enable us to capture a number of important features of japan s foreign trade in the analysis of exchange rate effects on the trade balance the following aspects are emphasized first a depreciation of the exchange rate may be partially offset by a change in export price in the opposite direction the magnitude of this offsetting effect is determined by the impacts on export price of competitors price and prices of imported intermediate goods second the impact of depreciation on the trade balance may also be weakened because depreciation raises the price of domestic manufactured goods and decreases people s incentive to switch from foreign to domestic manufactured goods third as stated above imports of fuels and raw materials are derived demands therefore price elasticities of these may not be very large in the short run among other variables affecting the trade balance we focus on cyclical variables such as domestic and foreign incomes there are direct effects of domestic income on the imports of intermediate goods and of foreign income on exports in addition we are especially interested in testing whether or not a domestic recession creates a pressure to increase exports such a possibility has been studied in the literature on the capacity pressure hypothesis see for example dunlevy 1980 in the following we first explain the framework of the analysis and estimate equations for the components of the trade balance the estimates are then used to assess quantitatively the importance of each of the mechanisms discussed above it is shown that all these interrelationships between various components of the trade balance are important we then proceed to present some simulation results that show the effects of exchange rate cyclical variables and input prices on the trade balance they indicate that exchange rate changes exert a quick but not very large impact on the trade balance an increase in the price of fuels leads to an immediate and significant worsening of the trade balance most important cyclical variables have crucial effects on the trade balance it is received for publication april 5 1982 revision accepted for publication december 10 1982 osaka universitv this paper is a substantially revised version of the first half of chapter 4 of the author s ph d dissertation at m i t the author would like to thank stanley fischer anonymous referees of this review and the participants in seminars at the university of tokyo the bank of japan economic planning agency and the ministry of international trade and industry japan for useful comments on earlier versions of the paper

margins of imports forward looking firms and exchange rate movements abstract this paper presents theory and evidence on firms import responses to current and future exchange rates along both intensive and extensive margins the paper first builds a dynamic heterogeneous firm model to study how firms adjust their import decision by taking into account both current and future exchange rates in the model individual firms pay a fixed sunk cost and face a probability of failure when searching for foreign intermediate suppliers the impact of future exchange rate on import is different from that of current exchange rate spot exchange rate appreciation would increase both the intensive margin import value of individual firm and the extensive margin the number of importing firms while future exchange rate appreciation increases the extensive margin rather than the intensive margin of imports the model predictions are strongly supported by an empirical analysis using disaggregated data on china s imports from the united states and forward rates between us dollar usd and chinese yuan cny on the non deliverable exchange market

exchange rate variability and the export demand for malaysia s semiconductors an empirical study this article examines the effects of exchange rate variability on export demand for semiconductors which is the largest sub sector of electronics industry in malaysia as reported by malaysian industrial development authority mida 2004 the empirical results which are estimated based on the johansen s multivariate cointegration tests and error correction model suggest that there is a unique long run relationship among quantities of export relative price real foreign income and real exchange rate variability the major finding of this article is that the variability of real exchange rate has some effect on semiconductor exports in both the long run and the short run in the light of rapid advances in technology in the global markets for electronics products the findings are useful to policy makers for the design and target of appropriate exchange rate and industrial policies to enhance the export competitiveness of semiconductor industry

the payments system liquidity and rediscounting in an economy where fiat money serves both as a medium of exchange and the means by which debts are cleared it is shown that nonoptimal equilibria of constrained liquidity may arise optimality may be restored by temporary expansions of the monetary base e g an active central bank discount window copyright 1996 by american economic association

liquidity a new monetarist perspective this essay surveys the new monetarist approach to liquidity work in this literature strives for empirical and policy relevance plus rigorous foundations questions include what is liquidity is money essential in achieving desirable outcomes which objects can or should serve in this capacity when can asset prices differ from fundamentals what are the functions of commitment and collateral in credit markets how does money interact with credit and intermediation what can and should monetary policy do the research summarized emphasizes the micro structure of frictional transactions and studies how institutions like monetary exchange credit arrangements or intermediation facilitate the exchange process

has exchange risk depressed international trade the impact of third country exchange risk abstract this paper argues that the effect of exchange risk on bilateral and aggregate trade flows should be analyzed by including the impact of third country exchange risk factors in addition to direct bilateral or multilateral risk after a theoretical examination of these effects us bilateral export flow to its six largest trading partners are analyzed empirically i find individuality and jointly significant third country risk effects in most cases in contrast to some recent bilateral efforts i find a steadily growing negative impact on trade flows from exchange risk during floating and in contrast to recent aggregate trade flow studies i conclude that there was no temporary decline in exchange risk during the late 1970s

chinese trade price and yuan s valuation this paper studies how the major economic events would have affected chinese yuan s nominal exchange rate against us dollar from 1989 to 2013 the traditional average treatment effect estimation methods cannot be used to consistently estimate yuan s pegged exchange rate we develop a new estimation strategy by combining a novel panel data method proposed by hisao ching and wan and the purchasing power parity theory based on this new estimation strategy we find that during the period of pegging to us dollar chinese yuan were undervalued before the 1997 asian financial crisis the pegged exchange rate regime starting from january 1994 made the yuan undervalued by 2 62 china s accession to wto caused yuan undervalued by 36 60 after the reform of chinese exchange rate policy in july 2005 the undervaluation of the yuan was reduced to only 0 76 yuan was undervalued again by 20 43 because of 2008 china s economy stimulus package the policy reform in june 2010 made yuan overvalued by 14 40 we conclude that chinese fixed exchange rate policy indeed undervalued the yuan especially after its accession to wto the recent reforms of chinese exchange rate policy made progresses in re evaluating the yuan

the effects of exchange rate variability on international trade a meta regression analysis the trade effects of exchange rate variability have been an issue in international economics for the past 30 years the contribution of this article is to apply meta regression analysis mra to the empirical literature on average exchange rate variability exerts a negative effect on international trade yet mra confirms the view that this result is highly conditional by identifying factors that help to explain why estimated trade effects vary from significantly negative to significantly positive mra evidence on the pronounced heterogeneity of the empirical findings may be instructive for policy first by establishing that average trade effects are not sufficiently robust to generalize across countries and second by suggesting the importance of hedging opportunities hence of financial development for trade promotion for the practice of mra we make a case for checking the robustness of results with respect to estimation technique model specification and sample

fixed exchange rates and trade abstract a classic argument for a fixed exchange rate is its promotion of trade empirical support for this however is mixed while one branch of research consistently shows a small negative effect of exchange rate volatility on trade another more recent branch presents evidence of a large positive impact of currency unions on trade this paper helps resolve this disconnect our results which use a new data based classification of fixed exchange rate regimes show a large significant effect of a fixed exchange rate on bilateral trade between a base country and a country that pegs to it these results suggest an economically relevant role for exchange rate regimes in trade determination since a significant amount of world trade is conducted between countries with fixed exchange rates

robust non parametric measures of exchange rate variability changes in exchange rates are well known to possess non gaussian distributions yet in testing for differences in exchange rate volatility few researches have examined measures that do not assume gaussian data this paper develops a robust non parametric measure for comparing exchange rate variability across time the measures are applied to monthly exchange rate data to test for differences in exchange rate variability across different monetary policy regimes the comparison show inconsistencies between conclusions based on the classical f test and the robust non parametric equivalent using the robust test for changes in exchange rate variability we do not conclude that variability has increased over time increases in variability do occur but usually only in specific percentiles of the data

conditional variance and the risk premium in the foreign exchange market abstract we investigate the existence of a risk premium in the foreign exchange market based on the conditional variance of market forecast errors the forecast errors are assumed to follow the arch process introduced by engle 1982 estimation and diagnostic testing of the model are discussed and results are presented for the currencies of the united kingdom france germany japan and switzerland