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 that also financial capacity, captured by the level...

Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous - "trade-cost elasticity" plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow and...

Empirical evidence suggests that sectoral export growth decreases exporters' survival probability, whereas this is not true for non-exporters. Models with firm heterogeneity in total factor productivity (TFP) predict the opposite. To solve this puzzle, we develop a two{factor framework where...

This paper highlights the crucial role played by international access to intermediate inputs to explain firm-level performance, via two channels simultaneously: trade and FDI. We develop a simple theoretical model showing that trade integration of input market entails an efficiency improvement...

We investigate the effects of human capital accumulation on trade and productivity by integrating a micro-founded education and fertility decision of households into a model of international trade with firm heterogeneity. Our theoretical framework leads to two testable implications: i) the...

Theoretical and empirical work on export dynamics has generally assumed constant marginal production cost and therefore ignored domestic product market conditions. However, recent studies have documented a negative correlation between firms' domestic and export sales growth, suggesting that...

This paper provides an estimation of the reaction of firm-level exports consecutive to real exchange rate movements - the exchange rate elasticity of exports. Following recent theoretical works emphasizing the role played by firm heterogeneity, we test in particular how the exchange rate...

This paper analyses the effect of imported inputs and the exporting country share on the degree of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) into export prices. I present a model where firms set variable markups under oligopoly competition and imported inputs affect marginal cost. It makes two...