Exchange Rates and the Working Capital Channel of Trade Fluctuations

Exchange rates affect the economy not only through the competitiveness of exports but also through a financial channel. The financial channel goes in the opposite direction to the competitiveness channel in that a stronger currency goes hand-in-hand with more buoyant real economic activity on the back of faster credit growth and cross-border banking flows. The effect is particularly marked for emerging market economies for the broad dollar index: a stronger dollar may actually lead to a decline in trade volumes of an emerging market economy. Our paper develops a stylized model that generates such an effect and finds supporting evidence in a firm-level investigation of manufacturing firms from Asia.