A Balls-and-Bins Model of Trade: Comment

Bernardo S. Blum, Sebastian Claro and Ignatius Horstmann

American Economic Review, 2016, vol. 106, issue 3, 843-51

Abstract: We show that the Armenter and Koren model's firm-product-country results rely on the assumption that export shipment size is independent of firm size, and this assumption is contradicted by the data. When actual shipment sizes are used in the balls-and-bins model, it cannot reproduce the data on single product/single country exporters. Beyond just showing that the shipment size assumption matters to balls-and-bins outcomes, our results highlight the important fact that shipment size is an economic decision, co-determined with other export choices. For this reason, we argue that a balls-and-bins model cannot be a purely statistical benchmark model. (JEL F11, F14, O13, O19, Q37)

JEL-codes: F11 F14 O13 O19 Q37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.20140372
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.20140372 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/aer/data/10603/20140372_data.zip (application/zip)
https://www.aeaweb.org/aer/ds/10603/20140372_ds.zip (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:106:y:2016:i:3:p:843-51

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Review is currently edited by Esther Duflo

More articles in American Economic Review from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().