The Turkey-US commodity trade and the asymmetric J-curve

Unlike past studies, recent studies try to separate currency appreciations from depreciations and show that indeed, the effects of exchange rate changes on the trade balance are asymmetric. We add to this literature by considering the response of the trade balance of 45 industries that trade between Turkey and the USA We find that the real lira-dollar rate has short-run asymmetric effects in 28 out of 45 industries. Short-run asymmetric effects translate into the long-run asymmetric effects in only 13 industries. While our findings are industry specific, additional analysis revealed that in some industries while depreciations had significant effects, appreciations did not, in some other industries the opposite was true. Such findings were hidden by the estimates of past traditional linear models.