The extensive margin of exporting products
Subtitle: a firm-level analysis
By: Costas Arkolakis, Marc-Andreas Muendler
Contributors: Muendler, Marc-Andreas; National Bureau of Economic Research
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 16641; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 16641.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Description: "We use a panel of Brazilian exporters, their products, and destination markets to document a set of regularities for multi-product exporters: (i) few top-selling products account for the bulk of a firm's exports in a market, (ii) the distribution of exporter scope (the number of products per firm in a market) is similar across markets, and (iii) within each market, exporter scope is positively associated with average sales per product.  Our data also show that firms systematically export their highest-sales products across multiple destinations.  To account for these regularities, we develop a model of firm-product heterogeneity with entry costs that depend on exporter scope.  Estimating this model for the within-firm sales distribution we identify the nature and components of product entry costs.  We find that firms face a strong decline in product sales with scope but also that market-specific entry costs drop fast.  Counterfactual experiments with globally falling entry costs indicate that a large share of the simulated increase in trade is attributable to declines in the firm's entry cost for the first product"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 4/7/2011.

Includes bibliographical references.

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