Bilateral, product-level data exhibit a number of strong patterns that can be used to evaluate international trade theories, notably the spatial incidence of “export zeros” (correlated with distance and importer size), and of export unit values (positively related to distance). We show that leading theoretical trade models fail to explain at least some of these facts, and propose a variant of the Melitz model that can account for all the facts. In our model, high quality firms are the most competitive, with heterogeneous quality increasing with firms’ heterogeneous cost.
You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format
from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.
An online appendix is available for this publication.
This paper was revised on January 5, 2010
Machine-readable bibliographic record -
MARC,
RIS,
BibTeX
