productivity distribution along the entire support. While the former underpredicts the thickness of the right tail, the latter does …

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 … international markets. We show that firms with low productivity may still be able to penetrate foreign markets provided they have …

their productivity draws at the entry stage and explore the implications in closed and open economy. By allowing firms to … productivity with a shape parameter that depends on industry-level characteristics. A novel result is that export opportunities, by …

-distributed firm productivity and fixed costs of exporting, predicts that, conditional on the fixed costs of exporting, all variation … of firm productivity allows the Melitz model to successfully match the role of the intensive margin evident in the EDD … estimate a generalized Melitz model with a joint lognormal distribution for firm productivity, fixed costs and demand shifters …