Industry-level exchange risk exposure of US multinationals: evidence from the Mexican and Asian financial crises

Abstract

This paper examines the industry-level exchange risk exposure of US multinationals during the 1994 Mexican Peso crisis and the 1997 Asian crisis. To do so, this paper constructs two individual data sets: the Asian data set containing US firms with Asian operations for the Asian crisis and the Mexican data set of the firms with Mexican operations for the Mexican crisis. It is found that industry-level exchange exposure of both data sets tends to be more significantly estimated during the crises rather than before the crises. In addition, regarding exchange rate changes type, the exposures of the Asian data set tend to be more significantly estimated with the simple exchange rate changes based on the random-walk assumption whereas the exposures of the Mexican data set tend to be more significantly estimated with the GARCH(1,1)-processed standard deviations of exchange rate.