Exporter Heterogeneity and Price Discrimination: A Quantitative View

Jae Wook Jung, Ina Simonovska and Ariel Weinberger ()

No 21408, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We quantify a class of commonly-employed general equilibrium models of international trade and pricing-to-market that feature firm-level heterogeneity and consumers with nonhomothetic preferences. We demonstrate theoretically that the models lack the flexibility to match salient features of US firm-level data. Consequently, we outline a theoretical framework that can reconcile the documented price dispersion across firms and markets, while maintaining consistency with cross-sectional observations on firm productivity and sales. We calibrate the model’s parameters to match bilateral trade flows across 71 countries as well as the productivity and sales advantages of US exporters over non-exporters. We find that the calibrated model accounts for the majority of the dispersion in prices of tradables across countries of different income levels, while maintaining a tight quantitative fit to firm-level data. Given its additional flexibility, the model quantitatively outperforms the existing alternatives and yields welfare gains for the US that are 14-54% higher, but at the cost of loss of tractability.

JEL-codes: F12 F14 F17 F6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-int
Note: ITI
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Published as Jae Wook Jung & Ina Simonovska & Ariel Weinberger, 2019. "Exporter heterogeneity and price discrimination: A quantitative view," Journal of International Economics, vol 116, pages 103-124.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21408.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Exporter heterogeneity and price discrimination: A quantitative view (2019)
Working Paper: Exporter Heterogeneity and Price Discrimination: A Quantitative View (2017)
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:nbr:nberwo:21408

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21408

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().