Trade Relationships, Bargaining and Export Dynamics

In the data, emerging market economies’ exports tend to grow after real devaluations, but even when these are large, the rise in export revenues is low and delayed. We examine this fact by in- troducing long-term trade relationships and bargaining into a standard small open economy model. Both domestic exporters and foreign importers need to spend time and resources to establish trade relationships. Once a relationship is formed, export prices and quantities are decided through bilat- eral bargaining. The presence of search frictions and bargaining alters the transmission mechanism of shocks. The long-term nature of trade relationships reduces the expenditure-switching effect re- sulting from exchange rate fluctuations and the allocative role of intermediate export prices. These elements improve the ability of the model to explain export growth following a large devaluation as well as other second moments. Moreover, our sensitivity analysis suggests that higher exporters’ bargaining power or lower trade adjustment costs would make an economy more resilient to interest rate shocks.