Convex vacancy creation costs shape firms’ responses to trade liberalisation. They induce capacity constraints by increasing firms’ costs of production. A profit maximising firm will therefore not fully meet the increased foreign demand, but serve only a few export markets. More productive...

We present a set of empirical regularities that characterize the export activity of firms. We decompose firm-level exports by product category across destination markets in a consistent manner for four data sets from Brazil, Chile, Denmark, and Norway. We relate the empirical regularities to new...