TY  - JOUR
AU  - Goldberg,Linda S.
AU  - Campa,José Manuel
TI  - Distribution Margins, Imported Inputs, and the Sensitivity of the CPI to Exchange Rates
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12121
PY  - 2006
Y2  - March 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12121
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12121.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Linda S. Goldberg
Research Department, 3rd Floor
Federal Reserve Bank-New York
33 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10045
Tel: 212/720-2836
Fax: 212/720-6831
E-Mail: linda.goldberg@ny.frb.org

Jose M. Campa
IESE Business School
Camino del Cerro del Aguila, 3
28023 Madrid
SPAIN
Tel: 34-91-357-0809
Fax: 34-91-357-2913
E-Mail: jcampa@iese.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2006-03-27
AB  - Border prices of traded goods are highly sensitive to exchange rates, but the CPI, and the retail prices of these goods, are more stable. Our paper decomposes the sources of this stability for twenty-one OECD countries, focusing on the important roles of distribution margins and imported inputs in transmitting exchange rate fluctuations into consumption prices. We provide rich cross-country and cross-industry details on distribution margins and their sensitivity to exchange rates, imported inputs used in different categories of consumption goods, and weights in consumption of nontradables, home tradables and imported goods. While distribution margins damp the sensitivity of consumption prices of tradable goods to exchange rates, they also lead to enhanced pass through when nontraded goods prices are sensitive to exchange rates. Such price sensitivity arises because imported inputs are used in production of home nontradables. Calibration exercises show that, at under 5 percent, the United States has the lowest expected CPI sensitivity to exchange rates of all countries examined. On average, calibrated exchange rate pass through into CPIs is expected to be closer to 15 percent.
ER  -