This paper estimates a heterogeneous firms trade model using disaggregate data on export values and prices. Prices contain information about differences in product quality across firms and countries that helps identify key mechanisms in the model. Examining within-country variation in export prices across destination markets, I find that prices behave in a manner inconsistent with the benchmark...

This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on heterogeneous firms and trade, which emphasizes firm selection into international markets and reallocations of resources across firms. We discuss the empirical challenges that motivated this research and its relationship to traditional trade theories. We examine the implications of firm heterogeneity for comparative advantage, market size,...

In this paper we examine how multinational …rms with varied levels of total factor productivity (TFP) self-select into di¤erent host countries. Using a dataset that records the subsidiaries of French manufacturing multinationals, we …nd that …rm-level TFP plays an important role in explaining the sorting of French …rms across host countries. Both the aggregateand …rm-level estimates suggest tha...

In the context of an infinitely repeated capacity-constrained price game, we endogenize the composition of a cartel when firms are heterogeneous in their capacities. When firms are sufficiently patient, there exists a stable cartel involving the largest firms. A firm with sufficiently small capacity is not a member of any stable cartel. When a cartel is not all-inclusive, colluding firms set a ...

We present a model in which monitoring costs determine firms’ outsourcing and offshoring decisions. We predict that the most productive firms outsource in the South, while the least productive produce in-house in the North. Within the range of intermediate productivities, firms with lower productivity outsource in the North, and those with higher productivity perform in-house production in the ...

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects the innovation incentives of firms, and what this implies for industry productivity and social welfare. For this purpose we develop a reciprocal dumping model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous R&D. We identify two effects of trade liberalization on productivity: a direct effect through changes in R&D investment, a...

Based on Helpman et al. (2004) we propose a simple two-country (Home and Foreign) model with heterogeneous firms to capture the role of FDI via utilizing time zone differences. Two countries are located in different time zones and there is no overlap in daily working hours. It will be shown that productivities of the firms undertaking FDI are higher than the productivities of non-FDI f i r m s ...

The majority of research to date investigating strategic tariffs in the presence of multinationals finds a knife-edge result where, in equilibrium, all foreign firms are either multinationals or exporters. Utilizing a model of heterogeneous firms, we find equilibria in which both pure exporters and multinationals coexist. We utilize this model to study the case of endogenously chosen tariffs. A...

This chapter reviews the new approach to international trade based on firm heterogeneity in differentiated product markets. This approach explains a variety of features exhibited in disaggregated trade data, including the higher productivity of exporters relative to non-exporters, within-industry reallocations of resources following trade liberalization, and patterns of trade participation acro...

We present a new approach to the estimation of production functions that allows for richer patterns of firm heterogeneity than can be accommodated under the proxy variable methods of Olley and Pakes (1996) and Levinsohn and Petrin (2003). In particular, we show that the economics of the firms static input choice contains the necessary identifying information to control for the endogeneity probl...