The Life-Cycle Dynamics of Exporters and Multinational Firms
73 Pages Posted: 23 Jan 2018
There are 2 versions of this paper
The Life-Cycle Dynamics of Exporters and Multinational Firms
The Life-Cycle Dynamics of Exporters and Multinational Firms
Date Written: December 05, 2017
Abstract
This paper studies the life-cycle dynamics of exporters and multinational enterprises (MNEs). We present a dynamic model of trade and MNE activity in which the mode of serving a market depends on the well-known proximity-concentration tradeoff. We show that the option of performing MNE activities in the model produces life-cycle patterns for exporters that differ from those in an export-only model. Calibrating our model to rich firm-level data from France and Norway, our main quantitative finding is that a reduction in trade costs triggers much larger responses in growth rates and exit rates, for young exporters, in the model with MNEs than in the model without MNEs. We also show that the model is largely consistent with a set of new facts on the joint life-cycle dynamic behavior of exporters and MNEs.
Keywords: international trade, exporters, multinational firm, Markov process, sunk cost, proximity-concentration tradeoff, trade liberalization
JEL Classification: F100, F200
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation