An International Comparison of Employment Adjustment to Exchange Rate Fluctuations

This paper evaluates the response of employment to exchange rate shocks at the industry level for G-7 countries. Using an empirical framework that places little structure on the data, we find that European industries, at least France and Germany, are much less influenced by exchange rate shocks and much slower to adjust to long run steady states. The United States, Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom and Italy all appear to adjust more quickly. German and Japanese employment are quite insensitive to exchange rate fluctuations, consistent with previous research on output and markup responses to exchange rates