Exchange rate pass-through in small, open, commodity-exporting economies : lessons from Canada

We analyse the pass-through of exchange rates to prices in small, open, commodity-exporting economies, taking Canada as a case study. We estimate pass-through on a wide cross-section of disaggregated import, producer, and consumer prices, conditional on commodity shocks that explain a major share of the volatility in prices and exchange rates. Our pass-through measure is free from endogeneity concerns between prices and exchange rates and leads, in some cases, to opposite inference in reference to the sign of the pass-through compared with standard estimates. By focusing on industry-level producer price indexes, we show that conditional pass-through decreases with industry market power, while it increases with the degree of import penetration and the persistence of industry-specific shocks