The Exchange Rate Exposure Puzzle

Abstract

Based on basic financial models and reports in business press, exchange rate movements are generally believed to affect value of nonfinancial firms. In contrast, empirical research on nonfinancial firms typically produces fewer significant exposures estimates than researchers expect, independent of sample studied and methodology used, giving rise to a situation known as the exposure puzzle. This paper provides a survey of existing research on exposure phenomenon for nonfinancial firms. We suggest that exposure puzzle may not be a problem of empirical methodology or sample selection as previous research has suggested, but is simply result of endogeneity of operative and financial hedging at firm level. Given that empirical tests estimate exchange exposures net of corporate hedging, both, firms with low gross exposure that do not need to hedge, as well as firms with large gross exposures that employ one or several forms of hedging, may exhibit only weak exchange rate exposures net of hedging. Consequently, empirical tests yield only small percentages of firms with significant stock price exposures in almost any sample.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.