productive enough to overcome the entry costs of foreign markets. Once firms pass this productivity threshold, they all export … non-exporters. However, selecting high export potentials is difficult in practice. The contribution of this paper is to … characterize and identify these (high) export potentials. According to the Melitz (2003) model, potential exporters have to be …

This paper characterizes the dynamic empirical properties of country export capabilities in order to inform modelling … heavy-tailed distribution of industry export capabilities that is approximately log normal and whose shape is stable across … productivities. We establish that mean reversion in export capability, rather than indicative of convergence in productivities or …

Why is it that exporter productivity premia (EPP) differ so widely in size? We take this question to the theory and to … EPPs across sectors, and hence across countries, can be explained by the variation in productivity dispersion, trade costs …

services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross …-border versus foreign affiliate sales. We find that for firms in our sample productivity is both a statistically significant and … economically important determinant of the export participation and export mode choice. We also identify the role of industry- and …