This paper contributes to the literature on firms’ export pricing by assessing whether and to what extent firms take into account the expected future evolution of the exchange rates while setting their prices. Using French micro-level trade data, our empirical analysis reveals that by adjusting their export prices, firms partly absorb information about future exchange rate variations. The extent to which individual exporters absorb future exchange rate fluctuations is found to depend on their market power, in accordance with theoretical dynamic demand-side models encompassing mechanisms creating an inter-temporal relationship between current market shares and future profits. The analysis also shows that the strength of such expectation-related mechanism is considerably reduced with greater future exchange rate uncertainty, in line with an interpretation of pricing-to-market as an investment decision under uncertainty. In a comparative perspective our results are shown to drive asymmetric responses across destinations of aggregate bilateral export flows to expected exchange rate movements.

本文通过评估企业在设定价格时是否以及在何种程度上考虑预期的未来汇率演变，为有关企业出口定价的文献做出了贡献。使用法国微观贸易数据，我们的实证分析表明，通过调整出口价格，企业部分吸收了有关未来汇率变化的信息。根据理论动态需求侧模型，包括在当前市场份额和未来利润之间建立跨期关系的机制，单个出口商吸收未来汇率波动的程度取决于他们的市场力量。分析还表明，随着未来汇率不确定性的增加，这种预期相关机制的强度会大大降低，符合市场定价作为不确定性下的投资决策的解释。从比较的角度来看，我们的结果显示，推动双边出口总额目的地对预期汇率变动的不对称反应。