Are firms that engage in trade more vulnerable to exchange rate risk? In this paper we examine the relationship between exchange rate movements, firm value and trade. Our empirical work tests whether exchange rate exposure can be explained by variables that proxy for the level of international activity, firm size, industry affiliation and country affiliation. The results suggest that while a significant fraction of firms in these countries is exposed to exchange rate movements, there is little evidence of a systematic link between exposure and trade. Indeed, what little evidence there is of a link suggests that firms that engage in greater trade exhibit lower degrees of exposure. This may reflect the fact that those firms most engaged in trade are also the most aware of exchange rate risk, and therefore are the most likely to hedge their exposure.

Finance theory suggests that changes in exchange rates should have little influence on asset prices in a world with integrated capital markets. Indeed, the existing literature examining the relationship between international stock prices and exchange rates finds little evidence of systematic exchange rate exposure. We argue in this paper that the absence of evidence may be due to restrictions imposed on the sample of data and the empirical specifications used in previous studies. We study a broad sample of firms in eight countries over an eighteen-year period. We find that firm-level and industry-level share values are significantly influenced by exchange rates. Further, we do not find evidence that exchange rate exposure is falling (or becoming less statistically significant) over time. Our results suggest that significant firm, industry and country-specific differences remain even as financial markets become more and more integrated.

Why did Finland experience, in 1991–1993, the deepest recession observed in an industrialized country since the 1930s? Using a dynamic general equilibrium model with labor frictions, we argue that the collapse of the Soviet-Finnish trade was a major contributor to the contraction. Finland's experience mirrors that of the transition economies of Eastern Europe, which suffered similar deep recessions coupled with institutional changes. By focusing on the Finnish case, we isolate the effects of the Finnish-Soviet trade collapse and shed new light on the sources of recessions in transition economies.

This paper evaluates the hypothesis that during the 2008–2009 collapse in international trade, imports of higher quality goods experienced larger reductions compared to low-quality imports, using data on US imports disaggregated by HS-10 product category and source country. We find little, if any, robust econometric evidence in support of this hypothesis.