Twin Peaks

This paper highlights a new stylized fact by documenting a great degree of heterogeneity in the distribution of export intensity across countries. Contrary to received wisdom from studies focusing on a single country, we show that export intensity distributions tend to exhibit modes at both ends of the support, a phenomenon that we refer to as `twin peaks'. Using a standard trade model with rm-destination specificc demand shifters we show that i) this feature directly results from heavy-tailed sale distributions ii) this feature (statistically) vanish for countries with large or small domestic market compared to their export market. Using publicly available firm-level data, we show that the model's structural parameters are easily estimated and can account for approximately 89 percent of cross-country variation in the distribution of export intensity. Our finding have many applications, notably with regards to volatility of firm's sales.