Dollar Invoicing and the Heterogeneity of Exchange Rate Pass-Through

Abstract

We show empirically that the variation across country pairs in exchange rate pass-through and trade elasticity is meaningfully explained by the dollar's dominance as invoicing currency. We use a hierarchical Bayesian approach to directly and flexibly model pass-through heterogeneity conditional on the invoicing currency share. We estimate that the importer's country-level dollar invoicing share explains 15 percent of the overall variance across trading pairs in dollar exchange rate pass-through into bilateral prices.