Truncated Firm Productivity Distributions and Trade Margins

Subhayu Bandyopadhyay and Cletus Coughlin

No 2017-18, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Abstract: A standard theoretical prediction is that average exports are independent of tariff rates when the underlying distribution of firm productivities is assumed to be the widely-used Pareto distribution. Assuming that the underlying distribution has no upper bound is undoubtedly inaccurate and produces theoretical results at odds with empirical results. In contrast, we show that upper-truncation of the Pareto distribution makes average exports rise with trade liberalization. This result is derived analytically, and is supported by simulations. We extend our analysis to the cases of lognormal and Frchet distributions, which are also frequently used by trade economists. Our findings for lognormal and Frchet distributions are qualitatively similar to the findings using the truncated Pareto.

Keywords: Truncated probability distributions; Extensive and intensive margins of trade; Import tariff; Pareto; Lognormal; Fréchet. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2017-07-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-int
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DOI: 10.20955/wp.2017.018

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