The paper develops a simple model to describe the dynamics of international trade flows. We show that such a setup is able to simultaneously match a large number of empirical regularities, such as the fraction of zero trade flows across pairs of countries, the positive relationship between...

The paper develops a model of proportionate growth to describe the dynamics of international trade flows. We show that a large number of the empirical regularities characterizing international trade — such as the fraction of zero trade flows across pairs of countries, the positive relationship...