TY  - UNPD
A1  - Carballo, Jeronimo
A1  - Ottaviano, Gianmarco I. P.
A1  - Volpe Martincus, Christian
T1  - The buyer margins of firms' exports
T2  - Center for Financial Studies (Frankfurt am Main): CFS working paper series ; No. 561
N2  - We use detailed data on exporters from Costa Rica, Ecuador and Uruguay as well as on their buyers to show that: aggregate exports are disproportionally driven by few multi-buyers exporters; and each multi-buyer exporter's foreign sales of any product are in turn accounted for by few dominant buyers. We propose an analytically solvable multi-country model of endogenous selection in which dominant exporters, dominant products and dominant buyers emerge in parallel as multi-product sellers with heterogeneous technologies compete for buyers with heterogeneous needs. The model not only provides an explanation of the existence of dominant buyers but also makes specific predictions on how the relative importance of dominant buyers should vary across export destinations depending on their market size and accessibility. We show that these predictions are borne out by our data and discuss their welfare implications in terms of gains from trade.
T3  - CFS working paper series - 561 
KW  - firm heterogeneity
KW  - taste heterogeneity
KW  - import-export relations
KW  - competition
KW  - selection
Y1  - 2016
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/42420
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-424209
UR  - https://ssrn.com/abstract=2875394
IS  - November 2016
PB  - Center for Financial Studies
CY  - Frankfurt, M.
ER  -