Market size matters for exporters if firms must recover fixed costs. This paper uses the relationship between the extensive margins of exports and destination market size to evaluate whether fixed costs operate at the firm or at the product level. If fixed costs are at the firm level,...

This paper develops a method to measure difficulties in market access over a large set of countries (both developing and developed) and industries, during the period 1980-2006. We use a micro-founded heterogeneous-consumers model to estimate the impact of national borders on global and regional...

This paper analyzes how firms adjust to differences in market size and demand uncertainty by changing the frequency and size of their export shipments. In our inventory model, transportation costs and optimal shipment frequency are determined on the basis of demand as well as inventory and per...

How well does the theory of the firm explain the choice between intrafirm and arms' length trade? This paper uses firm-level import data from France to look into this question. We find support for three key predictions of property-rights theories of the multinational firm. Intrafirm imports are...

Competitiveness has come to the forefront of the policy debate within the European Union, focusing on price competitiveness and intra-EU imbalances. But how to measure properly competitiveness, beyond price or cost competitiveness, remains an open methodological issue; and what is the resilience...

This paper provides evidence that learning about demand is an important driver of firms' dynamics. We present a simple model with Bayesian learning in which firms are uncertain about their idiosyncratic demand parameter in each of the markets they serve, and update their beliefs as noisy...

We estimate the elasticity of extra-EU French firm-level exports with respect to applied tariffs, a variable trade cost. We propose a methodology controlling for unobserved firm characteristics driving selection in exports market and for the usual resistance terms. Results confirm a significant...

This paper proposes a framework to analyze the functioning of the inter-bank liquidity market and the occurrence of liquidity crises. The model relies on three key assumptions: (i) liquidity provisioning is not verifiable -it cannot be contracted upon-, (ii) banks face moral hazard when...

In this paper, we analyze the consequences of endogenous migration flows over the coming decades in a dynamic general equilibrium model of the world economy. Such an approach has two major benefits. First, it offers a global perspective on the economic consequences of international migration...

The purpose of this paper is to cast a new light on the present state of global current account imbalances. As a first step, we compute the world distribution of current account balances, in order to highlight its historically-unprecedented pattern, both in terms of the size of imbalances, its...