The buyer margins of firms' exports

Jeronimo Carballo, Gianmarco Ottaviano and Christian Volpe Martincus

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We use highly disaggregated firm-level export data from Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Uruguay over the period 2005-2008 to provide a precise characterization of firms' export margins, across products, destination countries, and crucially customers. We show that a firm's number of buyers and the distribution of sales across them systematically vary with the characteristics of its destination markets. While most firms serve only very few buyers abroad, the number of buyers and the skewness of sales across them increases with the size and the accessibility of destinations. We develop a simple model of selection with heterogeneous buyers and sellers consistent with these findings in which tougher competition induces a better alignment between consumers' ideal variants and firms' core competencies. This generates an additional channel through which tougher competition leads to higher productivity and higher welfare and hints at an additional source of gains from trade as long as freer trade fosters competition.

JEL-codes: F12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/51578/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The buyer margins of firms' exports (2018)
Working Paper: The buyer margins of firms' exports (2018)
Working Paper: The buyer margins of firms' exports (2016)
Working Paper: The Buyer Margins of Firms' Exports (2013)
Working Paper: The Buyer Margins of Firms' Exports (2013)
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