This paper analyzes the firm's choice between serving a foreign market through exports or foreign affiliate sales in an environment characterized by country speci c shocks to the cost of production. Our model predicts that country pairs with less correlated output fluctuations trade more,...

There is wide debate over the impact of uncertainty on firm behavior, due to the difficulty both of measuring uncertainty and of identifying causality. This paper takes three steps that attempt to address these challenges. First, we develop an instrumental variables strategy that exploits firms'...