Relative Prices, Hysteresis, and the Decline of American Manufacturing†

Most recent draft here. This study uses new measures of real exchange rates to study the collapse of US man-ufacturing employment in the early 2000s in historical and international perspective. To identify a causal impact of RER movements on manufacturing, I compare the US experience in the early 2000s to the 1980s, when large US fiscal deficits led to a sharp appreciation in the dollar, and to Canada’s experience in mid-2000s, when high oil prices and a falling US dollar led to an equally sharp appreciation of the Canadian dollar. I use disaggregated sectoral data and a difference-in-difference methodology, finding that an appreciation in relative unit labor costs for the US lead to disproportionate declines in employment, output, investment, and productivity in relatively more open manufac-turing sectors. In addition, I find that the impact of a temporary shock to real exchange rates is surprisingly long-lived. I explain the persistent effects of exchange rate move-ments on manufacturing using a Melitz model extension with sunk fixed costs, which leads to a dynamic gravity equation whereby shocks to trade have persistent effects that decay over time. The appreciation of US relative unit labor costs can plausibly explain more than two-thirds of the decline in manufacturing employment in the early 2000s