Pricing-to-Market: the Japanese Experience with a Falling Yen and the Asian Crisis

The paper examines whether Japanese exporters changed their strategic pricing behavior as a result of the profit squeeze of the late 1980s. It shows that shocks such as the end‐of‐bubble, the prolonged yen depreciation, and the Asian crisis affected export prices. These effects, however, are too small to change the long‐run equilibrium relation between sectoral export prices and their determinants. In particular, results suggest that Japanese exporters are not using the depreciation of the yen to gain market share.