Firms’ entry choices across export products and markets, and the consequences of trade in an open economy: Evidence from China
本文构建了一个异质性企业模型，研究企业如何选择出口产品和市场，并利用中国微观贸易数据估计参数，揭示不同企业和市场对贸易成本变化的差异化反应。
We outline a model of endogenous choices of market entry and product scope in a partial-equilibrium model of heterogeneous firms with arbitrary productivity. Firms’ choices of interest depend on market characteristics including variable trade and fixed market-entry costs. Conditional on fixed costs, the extent to which firms respond to shocks depends on their (potentially nonparametric) density around the zero-profit threshold. Accordingly, identical changes in, e.g., variable trade costs per product and market can lead to vastly different responses across not only markets and products but also firms. We shed light on the heterogeneity of these responses by estimating parameters and otherwise calibrating the model to firm-and-product-level bilateral trade data for China.