Search

Pricing decisions of exporters who are facing imperfect competition in their destination markets might depend on exchange rate changes. While empirical literature often assumes that the impact of the exchange rate on the exporters' prices is linear and the markup adjustment does not depend on magnitude or direction of the exchange rate change (or allows for short-run asymmetries only), we question this statement and test for the long-run hysteresis and asymmetry of pricing-to-market (PTM). Using the German export beer market as an example, we show that both types of nonlinearities play an important role in PTM decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Pricing-to-market (PTM) is often reported to be adopted by exporters, who have invested in their presence on international markets and are interested in keeping and developing their market shares. Then, a markup adjustment is used to partially offset changes of the exchange rate, which are unfavorable for their foreign customers, in order to keep the price level in the importer's currency relatively unchanged. With only few exceptions, empirical literature often considers PTM adjustments to be linear and symmetric. If asymmetry is allowed, PTM is often regarded as contemporaneous, which is a very simplifying assumption, given the goals pursued by exporters employing PTM strategies. This paper applies the dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (ADRL) approach popularized by and its nonlinear extension by to the data of German sugar confectionery exports to various destination markets. It turns out that in the long-run PTM is neither linear nor symmetric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pricing-to-market (PTM) theory suggests that exporting monopolistic firms adjust their destination-specific mark-ups in the face of exchange rate shocks. A large proportion of the existing evidence for PTM comes from Wald tests applied to OLS- and IV-estimated parameters of single-equation models. Such tests can seriously over-reject in the presence of endogeneity and weak instruments so that some of the available results supporting PTM could be spurious. In this paper we revisit the PTM evidence for Japanese and German exporting firms in the transportation equipment industry. Using the model of Marston (1990), we apply exogeneity and LR-LIML-based tests for which the error probability is controlled irrespective of the quality of the available instruments. Our results show right-hand-side endogeneity in almost all of the examined PTM equations. In addition, we find that statistical decisions often differ depending on whether they are based on the traditional Wald test or on our proposed test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]