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Journal Article
Is the United States losing its productivity advantage?
Strikingly high rates of labor productivity growth in China, India, and other emerging economies have prompted concerns that U.S. workers and firms are losing ground to their competitors in world markets. A closer look at the evidence, however, suggests that rapid foreign productivity growth will bring gains as well as losses to the U.S. economy. Some import-competing firms may be compelled to restructure or leave the market, but consumers will benefit from lower import prices and more import varieties, and U.S. exporters may gain access to cheaper intermediate products from abroad.
Journal Article
What's behind volatile import prices from China?
In a sharp departure from earlier trends, the price of U.S. imports from China rose 6 percent in the 2006-08 period. To explore the forces behind this surprising increase, the authors create a new import index that uses highly disaggregated data to track price developments in different product types. The index reveals that the largest price increases were concentrated in industrial supplies - goods that rely heavily on commodity inputs. The authors conclude that the surge in commodity prices through mid-2008 was the primary driver of the rising import prices from China.
Report
The hitchhiker’s guide to missing import price changes and pass-through
A large body of empirical work has found that exchange rate movements have only modest effects on inflation. However, the response of an import price index to exchange rate movements may be underestimated because some import price changes are missed when constructing the index. We investigate downward biases that arise when items experiencing a price change are especially likely to exit or to enter the index. We show that, in theoretical pricing models, entry and exit have different implications for the timing and size of these biases. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics microdata, we derive ...
Journal Article
Why a dollar depreciation may not close the U.S. trade deficit
With the U.S. trade deficit at high levels, many look to a dollar depreciation to curb the U.S. appetite for foreign goods by pushing up the cost of imports. Yet three factors -- the use of the dollar in invoicing U.S. trade, the market share concerns of exporters, and sizable U.S. distribution costs -- could keep U.S. import prices from rising enough to reduce demand significantly. Evidence suggests that a weaker dollar will boost foreign demand for U.S. exports, but this adjustment by itself is unlikely to close the deficit.
Working Paper
Measurement matters for modeling U.S. import prices
We focus on capturing the increasingly important role that emerging economies play in determining U.S. import prices. Emerging market producers differ from others in two respects: (1) their cost structure is well below that of developed-market producers, and (2) their wide profit margins induce pricing policies that seek to exhaust production capacity. We argue that these features have dampened the short-run responses of import prices to changes in the value of the dollar but that they have not altered the associated long-run response. To capture these considerations, we develop a new method ...
Working Paper
Exchange rate pass-through to U.S. import prices: some new evidence
This paper documents a sustained decline in exchange rate pass-through to U.S. import prices, from above 0.5 during the 1980s to somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.2 during the last decade. This decline in the pass-through coefficient is robust to the measure of foreign prices that is included in the regression (i.e., CPI versus PPI), whether the estimation is done in levels or differences, and whether U.S. prices are included as an explanatory variable. Notably, the largest estimates of pass-through are obtained when commodity prices are excluded from the regression. In this case, the ...
Journal Article
Oil prices and the U.S. trade deficit
With the price of oil in world energy markets having nearly quadrupled over the last four years, it is little surprise that U.S. import prices have soared. One concern about these higher import prices relates to their implications for the U.S. trade balance, which turned to a deficit in 1992 and has been deteriorating ever since. ; This Economic Letter explores the relation between the surge in oil prices and the trade deficit by first reviewing data on U.S. international trade in goods and services. It then discusses a recent study that examines how the U.S. trade deficit might evolve in ...
Journal Article
Import prices and the exchange rate
Journal Article
Buy foreign while you can: the cheap dollar and exchange rate pass-through
Despite the dollar?s real depreciation in the past few years, the U.S. trade deficit has continued to increase, with the level of imports reaching record highs. Why has the cheaper dollar not made imports more expensive and exports more attractive and, in turn, reduced the trade deficit? ; This article presents evidence on the degree of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT)?the extent to which U.S. domestic import prices have moved in response to changes in the exchange rate?from December 1993 through December 2004. Using monthly data, the authors first decompose domestic import prices to their ...
Working Paper
Trade integration, competition, and the decline in exchange-rate pass-through
Over the past twenty years, U.S. import prices have become less responsive to the exchange rate. We propose that a significant portion of this decline is a result of increased trade integration. To illustrate this effect, we develop an open economy DGE model in which trade occurs along both the intensive and extensive margins. The key element we introduce into this environment is strategic complementarity in price setting. As a result, a firm's pricing decision depends on the prices set by its competitors. This feature implies that a foreign exporter finds it optimal to vary its markup in ...