Foreign Exchange-Rate Exposure of Swedish Firms

Abstract: The main focus of the paper is the problem of exchange-rate exposure of Swedish firms between Jan, 1st 2002 and Sep, 27th 2006. Defined as “a measure of the potential for a firm’s profitability, net cash flow, market value to change because of a change in exchange rates”, the problem of exchange rate exposure is investigated, making use of the “Market Value Approach” (also known as “Stock Market Ap-proach”), with certain additional extensions. With Sweden being a very open economy with strong export orientation, we expected to find a greater number of firms showing significant ex-change rate exposure to one or more of the chosen 6 bilateral exchange rates (SEK/EUR, SEK/USD, SEK/DKK, SEK/NOK, SEK/GBP and SEK/JPY). Also, companies are divided into categories with respect to their main operating activity. The empirical study finds 78% of all companies in the sample with significant exposure, with dominance of lagged effect over con-temporaneous. This percentage is higher than found in previous empirical studies, being in sup-port of the suggestion that relation exists between economy openness and exchange rate expo-sure of firms. However, the significant cross-section differences across categories and the high level of heterogeneity within categories deter us from determining the sign, direction and magni-tude of the exchange rate exposure. Suggestions are made for further studies and possible exten-sions of the topic of the present paper.