How Did Exchange Rates Affect Employment In U.S. Cities?
Published online on December 16, 2015
Abstract
We estimate the effects of exchange rate on U.S. employment, exploiting differences in industrial composition across major cities. We find that a 1% depreciation of export‐weighted real exchange rate has a positive 0.98% direct effect on manufacturing employment. Its indirect effect on local nonmanufacturing employment rises with the size of the local manufacturing sector, consistent with the hypothesis that there exists a local spillover from the tradable to the nontradable sector. In cities with heavy concentration of manufacturing employment, the indirect effect is statistically significant and about 60% as large as the direct effect measured by the number of jobs. (JEL F3, F1, J2)