Trade barriers and trade flows with product heterogeneity: An application to US motion picture exports

We extend Melitz (2003) to allow for both global and bilateral fixed export costs. If global (bilateral) export costs dominate, the average sales ratio (import sales per product variety/domestic sales per variety), decreases (increases) in variable (fixed) trade barriers, due to adjustment along the intensive (extensive) margin of trade. Using novel data on bilateral US movie exports we find that (i) variation in box-office revenues per movie is much larger than in the number of movies exported, and (ii) the average sales ratio decreases in geographic and linguistic distance. These findings suggest that global fixed export costs dominate.