Shipment frequency of exporters and demand uncertainty: An inventory management approach

Gábor Békés, Lionel Fontagné, Balazs Murakozy and Vincent Vicard

Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL

Abstract: This paper studies how exporting firms optimize their inventory management in order to adapt to the uncertainty stemming from demand volatility. We motivate our analysis with a stochastic inventory management framework. We use monthly micro data on French exporters and find that greater uncertainty is associated with lower sales volume. We decompose this effect to its two margins, the number of shipments and average shipment size to find that the number of shipments decreases more quickly as uncertainty increases which is in line with firms adjusting their inventory policy as well as their exported volume as a result of increased uncertainty. Also, uncertainty was found to matter more at distant markets where the uncertainty between firm actions and the arrival of the products is the largest.

Keywords: firms; frequency of trade; gravity; inventory model; transport costs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12-15
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Related works:
Working Paper: Shipment frequency of exporters and demand uncertainty: An inventory management approach (2015)
Working Paper: Shipment frequency of exporters and demand uncertainty: An inventory management approach (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:cesptp:hal-01315615

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