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Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 127 No. 1 2012

How do Different Exporters React to Exchange Rate Changes?

N. Berman1,2; P. Martin3,4; Thierry Mayer3

1 Centre d'Économie de la Sorbonne · 2 Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies · 3 Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris · 4 Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract

This article analyzes the heterogeneous reaction of exporters to real exchange rate changes using a very rich French firm-level data set with destination-specific export values and volumes on the period 1995–2005. We find that high–performance firms react to a depreciation by increasing significantly more their markup and by increasing less their export volume. This heterogeneity in pricing-to-market is robust to different measures of performance, samples, and econometric specifications. It is consistent with models where the demand elasticity decreases with firm performance. Since aggregate exports are concentrated on high-productivity firms, precisely those that absorb more exchange rate movements in their markups, heterogeneous pricing-to-market may partly explain the weak impact of exchange rate movements on aggregate exports.

DOI
10.1093/qje/qjr057
Volume
127
Issue
1
Pages
437-492
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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