The Impact of Exchange Rate Volatility on Commodity Trade between the U.S. and China

Abstract

Exchange rate uncertainty is said to have negative or positive effects on the trade flows. A Large body of the empirical research that tries to address the issue has used aggregate trade data between one country and rest of the world, or bilateral total trade data between two countries. The support for a significant relation between a measure of exchange rate volatility and trade flows is negligible from these studies. In this paper, when we use disaggregated data between the U.S. and China at commodity level (88 industries) and a bounds testing approach to cointegration, we find that almost half of the industries are sensitive to a measure of exchange rate uncertainty.