taste decreases in distance but this relationship is not monotonic. The contribution of consumer taste to actual export … product quality explain twice as much of the variation in export revenues than cost. …

separates taste from quality and productivity (TFPQ) at the firm-product level. Export data by destination countries allow us to … identify the level of taste from consumer heterogeneity across destinations. We decompose export revenue into the contribution … of taste, quality and costs. We find that taste is very important and explains about 50 % of the variation in export …