A striking pattern in transaction-level data is the concentration of international shipments in the hands of a few large firms. One common feature of dominating high-performance firms is that they produce multiple products and ship them to many destinations. Motivated by the emergence of highly...

Recent trade theory in the Krugman (1980) tradition predicts that countries with larger market size enjoy higher levels of total factor productivity (TFP) - and equivalently of real per capita income or welfare - as a smaller fraction of spending on inputs is affected by trade costs. However, in...

This paper explores the role of pooled-producer, e.g. private label, trade intermediation in shaping the range and diversity of exports. Direct sales maintain a firm's unique product characteristics ("brand equity"), whereas trade through an intermediary can take two forms - either a wholesaling...

This paper introduces quality innovations with endogenous sunk costs in a heterogeneous firm model of international trade and derives implications for the gravity equation. The model predicts that the effect of fixed costs on exports and on the share of exporters is lower in industries with a...

Starting from the premise that productivity is heterogeneous across firms, Melitz (2003) explains why individual productivity is key in determining the capability of a firm to export. In this paper we build a model along Melitz's lines to show that also financial capacity, captured by the level...

This paper introduces finance or credit in the Dixit-Stiglitz-Krugman (DSK) model of international trade. It identifies mechanisms by which finance can affect the main results of the conventional model. The key results are as follows. Perfect credit market does not affect number of varieties or...

We present a unified dynamic framework to study the interconnections between international trade and business cycle models. We prove an aggregate equivalence between a competitive, representative firm model that has aggregate production externalities and dynamic trade models that feature...

In a two-country international trade model with oligopolistic competition, we study the conditions on market structure and trade costs under which a merger policy designed to benefit domestic consumers is too tough or too lenient from the viewpoint of the foreign country. Calibrating the model...

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...