Firms face competing needs to expand product variety and reduce production costs. Trade policy affects firm investments in product variety and production processes differently. Access to larger markets enables innovation to reduce costs. Although firm scale increases, foreign competition reduces...

We study how firms respond to import competition by increasing the speed of trade. We use data on all Portuguese textile and clothing exporters' monthly transactions and exploit the exogenous increase in competition following the removal of Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) quotas on Chinese...

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences...

This paper discusses the place of oligopoly in international trade theory, and argues that it is unsatisfactory to ignore firms altogether, as in perfectly competitive models, or to view large firms as more productive clones of small ones, as in monopolistically competitive models.  Doing...

This paper analyses the relationship between firm productivity and export behavior in German manufacturing firms. We examine whether productivity increases the probability of exporting, and assert that there is a causal relationship from high productivity to entering foreign markets, as...

This paper tests some of the predictions of recent advances in trade theory that have focused on different trade patterns of firms within the same sector. Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple (2005) develop a model in which innate productivity differences between firms determine the degree of...

By building a theoretical model and taking it to the data with two novel datasets, this paper analyses the interaction between credit constraints and exporting behaviour. Building a heterogeneous firms model of international trade with liquidity-constrained firms yields several predictions on...