In: Economics
(a) If the European Central Bank pursues a contractionary monetary policy, will the U.S. dollar appreciate or depreciate. Include the relevant graph and a brief explanation. You must use the asset-market approach to exchange rate determination in answering this question.
(b) How will this change in the value of the dollar affect U.S. net exports? Explain your answer briefly.
a). If the European Central Bank pursues a contractionary monetary policy, then the US dollar will depreciate. This is because a contractionary monetary policy will shift the supply for Euro to the left, thereby leading to a higher equilibrium exchange rate of euro as against dollar.
b) This change in the value will lead to higher net exports. This is because the depreciation of the dollar would mean that for every euro that the exporter received by selling a product, the number of dollars that the exporter gets per unit sold will now be higher. Thus, now since exporter has a higher chance of getting more dollars by selling the same quantity of products, the exporter will want to expert more and thus increase the total exports. Also, the demand for imports will reduce in this case because now importing one unit of the same product would mean paying more dollars. Thus, there will be an increase in the total exports and reduction in total imports, thereby leading to higher net exports( Total Exports - Total Imports)