How Sensitive are the U.S. Inpayments and Outpayments to Exchange Rate Changes: An Asymmetry Analysis

Previous studies that assessed the impact of exchange rate changes on a country’s inpayments and outpayments assumed that such effects are symmetric. The evidence from the literature reveals that import and export prices react to exchange rate changes in an asymmetric manner. This implies that export earnings and payments for imports should also react to exchange rate changes in an asymmetric manner. We demonstrate this by using Shin et al.’s (2014) nonlinear ARDL approach and inpayments and outpayments of the U.S. with her 15 trading partners. We find evidence of short-run as well as long-run asymmetric effects in more than half of the models, though the findings are found to be partner specific.