TY  - JOUR
AU  - Arkolakis,Costas
AU  - Muendler,Marc-Andreas
TI  - The Extensive Margin of Exporting Products: A Firm-level Analysis
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16641
PY  - 2010
Y2  - December 2010
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16641
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16641.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Costas Arkolakis
Department of Economics
Yale University, 28 Hillhouse Avenue
P.O. Box 208268
New Haven, CT 06520-8268
Tel: 203/432-3527
Fax: 203/432-6323
E-Mail: costas.arkolakis@yale.edu

Marc-Andreas Muendler
Department of Economics, 0508
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0508
Tel: 858/534-4799
Fax: 858/534-7040
E-Mail: muendler@ucsd.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -