Firm Heterogeneity and the Geography of International Trade

A key distinction which has emerged from heterogeneous firm models of international trade is that of exporting at the intensive and extensive margins. Empirically however, the two are often conflated, leading to biased estimates of the impact of falling trade costs. This paper exploits detailed firm level data, which includes information on the destination of exports to investigate causal links between enterprise productivity and the number of markets a firm serves as well as the relative size of those markets. Our focus is Sweden’s Food and Beverage sector, which is not only highly open, but has been subject to policy induced changes in trade costs (as well as falling natural barriers) over our sample period. We have data on almost 10,000 firm / time / destination observations across 6 years and 138 destinations. Our results confirm that conflating adjustment at the internal and external margins does bias trade resistance effects. Combining detailed firm specific information with data on destination characteristics confirms the importance of a range of country specific characteristics (including exchange rate risk) and facilitates the estimation of both distance and market size elasticities, from firm level data.trade costs, firm characteristics, destination characteristics, market size, distance

Demand Patterns and Vertical Intra-Industry Trade: With Special Reference to North-South Trade

Abstract is not availabl

The Features of a Survey on the Export Decisions of Swedish Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

This paper presents the features of a survey on Swedish firms’ export decisions conducted in February 2015 focusing on a sample of 10,000 small and medium-sized enterprises. The survey was divided into two major sections. The first section targeted all firms and focused on firms’ general situation (e.g. competition, type of co-operations, etc.). The second section focused on firms’ export decisions and was only addressed to current, former and future exporters. Around 3,000 firms answered the questionnaire within a three-month period. We show that the survey does not suffer from any non-response biases by investigating whether respondents differ from non-respondents, whether early respondents differ from late ones, and whether the respondents’ answers can be validated with external and more objective information. We are therefore confident that the survey may be used to represent the total population of small and medium-sized enterprises in the Swedish manufacturing sector