Export Prices Across Firms and Destinations

Kalina Manova and Zhiwei Zhang

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2012, vol. 127, issue 1, 379-436

Abstract: This article establishes six stylized facts about firms' export prices using detailed customs data on the universe of Chinese trade flows. First, across firms selling a given product, exporters that charge higher prices earn greater revenues in each destination, have bigger worldwide sales, and enter more markets. Second, firms that export more, enter more markets, and charge higher export prices import more expensive inputs. Third, across destinations within a firm-product, firms set higher prices in richer, larger, bilaterally more distant and overall less remote countries. Fourth, across destinations within a firm-product, firms earn bigger revenues in markets where they set higher prices. Fifth, across firms within a product, exporters with more destinations offer a wider range of export prices. Finally, firms that export more, enter more markets, and offer a wider range of export prices pay a wider range of input prices and source inputs from more origin countries. We propose that trade models should incorporate two features to rationalize these patterns in the data: more successful exporters use higher quality inputs to produce higher quality goods (stylized facts 1 and 2), and firms vary the quality of their products across destinations by using inputs of different quality levels (stylized facts 3, 4, 5, and 6). Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (546)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjr051 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Export Prices Across Firms and Destinations (2009)
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:oup:qjecon:v:127:y:2012:i:1:p:379-436

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().