Exchange Rates and Corporate Pricing Strategies

This paper reviews the recent literature on pass-through and pricing-to-market. Pricing-to market behavior is estimated for a new, larger data set with 60 German and 20 U.S. 7-digit industries. The results conform closely to what has been found elsewhere in smaller detailed data sets and at higher levels of aggregation. German exporters show more tendency to price-to-market than U.S. exporters for the sample of industries studied, but there is much variation across the industries. Surprisingly, pricing-to-market is more pronounced in German exports of steel and chemicals than in consumer goods.