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Thesis

English

ID: <

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11794/36913

>

Where these data come from
Three essays on exchange rate pass-throughs and pricing to market 3 essays on exchange rate pass-throughs and pricing to market

Abstract

This thesis outlines how firms adjust their prices in different markets in response to exchange rate variations (exchange rate pass-through). Generally, these price adjustments depend on each market’s characteristics such as the degree of competition, demand elasticities, and product characteristics (pricing to market). We investigate the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) and pricing to market (PTM) in three chapters employing concepts from international trade theory and industrial-organization (I/O) approach. The ERPT is complete when the export price just offsets the variation in the exporting country’s currency. The ERPT is incomplete when the change in the exchange rate is not completely transmitted to the export price. The ERPT is perverse when the export price varies more proportionally than the exchange rate. In the first chapter, we examine the relationship between the shelf life of food products, the processing technology, and the ERPTs. Several food products have the characteristic of being sold quickly or being converted to less perishable products, stored and marketed in subsequent periods. Such coupling between fresh and processed products impacts on how their prices evolve in response to exchange rate shocks. Our model considers the capacity of processing and storage. Our results show that the rise in the perishability of the processed product decreases the short-run ERPTs for the fresh and processed product prices before the inventory accumulation and increases the short-run ERPTs during the inventory building. Moreover, we find a negative relationship between the persistence of the exchange rate appreciation and the inventory accumulation. We also show that perverse short-run ERPTs can emerge if the trade cost accounts for a significant proportion of the total costs even if the long-run pass-throughs are always incomplete. In the second chapter, we analyze the ERPTs for export prices in the presence of jointness in production. Several agricultural products share some inputs and are produced in fixed proportions (e.g., pork shoulders and pork loins or chicken legs and chicken breast). Thus, the increase in the production of one product is accompanied by increases in the production of other products. It follows that the ERPT of one product is directly linked to the ERPT of jointly produced products. As a result, some ERPTs may be perverse, especially when consumers in the home and foreign countries have non-identical heterogeneous preferences or the joint products are produced in asymmetric proportions. We also show that the degree of substitutability between products enhances the perverse ERPTs. Finally, we show that the firm tends to make smaller price adjustments when there are fewer joint products. In the last chapter, we develop a static version of the model developed that allows production and processing costs to take nonlinear forms. The latter lead to economies or diseconomies of scale depending on their convexity properties. The ERPTs of export prices are often incomplete but perverse ERPTs can be observed under different assumptions regarding marginal production and processing costs.

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