An empirical examination of the effects of the U.S. dollar depreciation on the United States-Japan trade balance, with a control for auto quality diffe

Abstract

This paper models the effect on the U.S. — Japan trade balance in manufactures of the shift during the 80's from a strong to a weak dollar regime, while controlling for the effects of changes in auto quality across U.S. and Japanese new passenger autos. U.S. auto imports are broken out from other manufactures, and auto prices adjusted to control for quality by means of a quasi-hedonic equation. Limited empirical evidence does suggest that using a quality-adjusted auto relative price, in place of a relative price term with no quality adjustment, increases the ability to explain variations of auto import demand. Changes in the U.S. dollar/yen rate give rise to a J-curve effect from 1985 to 1987, and a similar but more negative pattern holds when quality is not controlled for. The effect of positive U.S. auto quality change, ceteris paribus, is also investigated, and is found to have a substantial deficit reducing effect.