Productivity Shocks and Real Effective Exchange Rates

This paper provides new insights into the relationship between exchange rates and productivity developments for European Economies. We focus on the question whether productivity changes have a long-run impact on real effective exchange rates for a large number of European economies. Focusing on a sample period running from 1995 until 2013, we adopt a cointegrated vector autoregressive approach and distinguish between long-run equilibrium, short-run dynamics and long-run impact of shocks. Our findings show that for several industrialized economies, real effective exchange rates and labor productivity are not related over the long-run. A possible explanation for this result is that wage developments do not reflect increases in labor productivity to a large degree, which prevents a transmission to the real effective exchange rate through the price channel. The results for Central and Eastern European Countries are more encouraging since a positive impact of labor productivity on real effective exchange rate is frequently observed.