Effects of Exchange Rate Volatility on Tourist Flows into Iceland

This paper examines the effect of Exchange Rate Volatility (ERV) for Iceland, on tourist arrivals exports during the period of first quarter of 1990 to fourth quarter of 2014. It is claimed by some researchers that exchange rate volatility causes a reduction on tourist arrivals. Empirical researchers often utilize the standard deviation of the moving average of the logarithm of the exchange rate as a measure of exchange rate fluctuation. In this study, a new measure for measuring volatility is proposed. The empirical methodology used relies upon the theory of cointegration, error correction representation of the exchange rate volatility measures using the Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) modeling to cointegration. Overall, our findings suggest that there is a negative effect of volatility to tourists’ arrivals for Iceland.