Superstar exporters: An empirical investigation of strategic interactions in Danish export markets

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ciliberto, Federico; Jakel, Ina C.
• 署名单位: University of Virginia; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Leibniz Association; DIW Berlin - Deutsches Institut fur Wirtschaftsforschung; Aarhus University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2020.103405
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: Export participation; strategic interaction; multiple equilibria; Trade policy

摘要

In many countries, exports are highly concentrated among a few ?superstar? firms. We estimate the export decisions of superstar firms as the result of a complete information, simultaneous, discrete choice, static entry game. We employ a dataset on the universe of Danish trade transactions by firm, product and destination. We also obtain detailed information on applied, preferential tariff protection from the MAcMap-HS6 database. We find evidence of strong negative competitive effects of entry: in the absence of strategic competitive effects, firms would be 53.2 percentage points more likely to export to a given market. Next, we run two counterfactual exercises. We show that failing to account for the strategic interaction among superstar exporters leads to: (i) overstating the probability that firms would start exporting to a market following tariff elimination by a factor of two; and, (ii) overstating the probability that firms would stop exporting to a market if tariffs were imposed by a factor of more than five. ? 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. In many countries, exports are highly concentrated among a few ?superstar? firms (Freund and Pierola, 2015). For example, in the United States, the top 1% of exporters accounted for 80% of total exports in 2000 (Bernard et al., 2007). In Denmark, the top 1% of exporters accounted for 47% of total exports in 2007, and, on average, the top 5 firms in an industry accounted for 80% of exports. Motivated by these observations, we conduct an empirical analysis of export decisions where superstar firms behave strategically. Then, we use our estimated model to run two counterfactual exercises and investigate the effect of changes in tariffs on the export decisions of the superstar firms. Our main objective is to contribute to the understanding of the role of superstars in international trade. Despite the dominance