A signi…cant proportion of international trade is in intermediate goods. This paper considers theoretically and empirically how exporters' dependence on imported inputs a¤ects their choice of invoicing currency. The model predicts that exporters that depend more on foreign currency-denominated inputs are less likely to price in their home currency. I test this and other theoretical results using a novel dataset that covers UK trade transactions with non-EU countries. I …nd considerable support for the model's predictions. A 10 percentage point higher share of foreign currency-denominated inputs is associated with a 20 percentage point higher probability of pricing in the same foreign currency relative to the producer's currency.JEL Classi…cation: F1, F31, F41.

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Using detailed firm-level transactions data for UK imports, we find that invoicing in a vehicle currency is pervasive, with more than half of the transactions in our sample invoiced in neither sterling nor the exporter’s currency. We then study the relationship between invoicing currencies and the response of import unit values to exchange rate changes. We find that for transactions invoiced in a vehicle currency, import unit values are much more sensitive to changes in the vehicle currency than in the bilateral exchange rate. Pass-through therefore substantially increases once we account for vehicle currencies. This result helps to explain why UK inflation turned out higher than expected when sterling depreciated during the Great Recession and after the Brexit referendum. Finally, within a conceptual framework we show why bilateral exchange rates are not suitable for capturing exchange rate pass-through under vehicle currency pricing. Overall, our results help to clarify why the literature often finds a disconnect between exchange rates and prices when vehicle currencies are not accounted for.

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