Markups, quality, and trade costs
利用阿根廷酒企出口数据与专家评级，研究发现出口商在更远市场提高加成率、在高关税国家降低加成率，且高质量出口的加成率对贸易成本变化反应更弱。
This paper examines how trade costs induced by geographic distance or bilateral tariffs impact the markups of exports differentiated by quality. It relies on a data set that combines Argentinean firm-level wine exports with experts’ wine ratings as a measure of quality. Exporters price discriminate across destinations by raising markups in more distant markets, and by lowering them in high-tariff countries. However, the response of markups to changes in trade costs is heterogeneous and weaker for higher quality exports. These empirical patterns can be predicted by trade models featuring demand functions more convex than log-concave, but less than superconvex. They demonstrate that the variation in firm-level export unit values across markets is not only driven by quality differences but also by markup variation conditional on quality.