An anatomy of international trade: evidence from french firms
TLDR
In this paper, the authors examine the sales of French manufacturing firms in 113 destinations, including France itself, and find that the number of French firms selling to a market, relative to French market share, increases systematically with market size.Abstract:
We examine the sales of French manufacturing firms in 113 destinations, including France itself. Several regularities stand out: (i) the number of French firms selling to a market, relative to French market share, increases systematically with market size; (ii) sales distributions are similar across markets of very different size and extent of French participation; (iii) average sales in France rise systematically with selling to less popular markets and to more markets. We adopt a model of firm heterogeneity and export participation which we estimate to match moments of the French data using the method of simulated moments. The results imply that over half the variation across firms in market entry can be attributed to a single dimension of underlying firm heterogeneity: efficiency. Conditional on entry, underlying efficiency accounts for much less of the variation in sales in any given market. We use our results to simulate the effects of a 10 percent counterfactual decline in bilateral trade barriers on French firms. While total French sales rise by around $16 billion (U.S.), sales by the top decile of firms rise by nearly $23 billion (U.S.). Every lower decile experiences a drop in sales, due to selling less at home or exiting altogether.read more
Figures
Table 6 - Counterfactuals: Firm Growth by Initial Size 
Figure 1: Entry and Sales by Market Size 
Figure 6: Productivity and Markets Penetrated 
Table 3 - Aggregate Outcomes of Counterfactual Experiment (first of two panels) 
Figure 5: Model Versus Data 
Table 1 - French Firms Exporting to the Seven Most Popular Destinations
Citations
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References
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On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
TL;DR: The editors of this monumental undertaking as discussed by the authors have achieved near perfection as near to perfection as anything human can be, and nothing but praise can be accorded to the editors and reviewers.
Posted Content
Scale Economies, Product Differentiation, and the Pattern of Trade
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a simple formal analysis which incorporates these elements, and show how it can be used to shed some light on some issues which cannot be handled in more conventional models.
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Export Versus FDI with Heterogeneous Firms
Elhanan Helpman,Elhanan Helpman,Elhanan Helpman,Marc J. Melitz,Marc J. Melitz,Marc J. Melitz,Stephen R. Yeaple +6 more
TL;DR: In this article, Helpman et al. introduce a simple multicountry, multisector model, in which firms face a proximity-concentration trade-off between exports and FDI.