Welfare and Trade without Pareto
在异质性企业模型中，用对数正态分布替代帕累托分布能更好拟合企业销售分布，但贸易利得大小取决于固定成本和分布参数的校准方法，对称两国模型下对数正态假设的贸易利得可达帕累托假设的两倍。
Quantifications of gains from trade in heterogeneous firm models assume that productivity is Pareto distributed. Replacing this assumption with log-normal heterogeneity retains some useful Pareto features, while providing a substantially better fit to sales distributions-especially in the left tail. The cost of log-normal is that gains from trade depend on the method of calibrating the fixed cost and productivity distribution parameters. When set to match the size distribution of firm sales in a given market, the log-normal assumption delivers gains from trade in a symmetric two-country model that can be twice as large as under the Pareto assumption.