This paper studies the influential Melitz model of trade with heterogeneous firms using an alternative, intuitive approach. Contrary to what is often argued, it is an increase in product market competition that drives the bad firms out: with two-way trade, entry by foreign firms is not compensated by a “sufficient” reduction in the mass of surviving firms. To illustrate this, we decompose the total effect of trade in two partial effects: a domestic-profit-reducing effect due to foreign market penetration by the most productive firms; an average-profit-reducing effect due to the payment of the fixed export costs. We also provide the new prediction that trade generally leads to (weakly) less entry in the industry. This clarifies key interpretation issues in a prolific literature.
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Paper provided by ESSEC Research Center, ESSEC Business School in its series ESSEC Working Papers with number
DR 09001.
Find related papers by JEL classification: F10 - International Economics - - Trade - - - General F12 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies
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