TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bernard,Andrew B.
AU  - Jensen,J. Bradford
AU  - Redding,Stephen J.
AU  - Schott,Peter K.
TI  - Firms in International Trade
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13054
PY  - 2007
Y2  - April 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13054
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13054.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Andrew B. Bernard
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth
100 Tuck Hall
Hanover, NH  03755
Tel: 603/646-0302
Fax: 603/646-0995
E-Mail: Andrew.B.Bernard@dartmouth.edu

J. Bradford Jensen
McDonough School of Business
Georgetown University
Washington, DC 20057
Tel: 202/687-3767
E-Mail: jbj24@georgetown.edu

Stephen J. Redding
Department of Economics
and Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University
Fisher Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609/258-4016
Fax: 609/258-6419
E-Mail: reddings@princeton.edu

Peter K. Schott
Yale School of Management
135 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06520-8200
Tel: 203/436-4260
Fax: 203/432-6974
E-Mail: peter.schott@yale.edu
AB  - Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences present a challenge to standard trade models and shows how recent "heterogeneous-firm" models of international trade address these challenges. We then make use of transaction-level U.S. trade data to introduce a number of new stylized facts about firms and trade. These facts reveal that the extensive margins of trade -- that is, the number of products firms trade as well as the number of countries with which they trade -- are central to understanding the well-known role of distance in dampening aggregate trade flows.
ER  -