THE MORE WE DIE, THE MORE WE SELL? A SIMPLE TEST OF THE HOME-MARKET EFFECT

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Costinot, Arnaud; Donaldson, Dave; Kyle, Margaret; Williams, Heidi
• 署名单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research; Universite PSL; MINES ParisTech; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjz003
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 843-894
• 关键词: INTERNATIONAL-TRADE; economic-geography; increasing returns; product differentiation; comparative advantage; size; demand; INNOVATION; pattern; scale

摘要

The home-market effect, first hypothesized by Linder (1961) and later formalized by Krugman (1980), is the idea that countries with larger demand for some products at home tend to have larger sales of the same products abroad. In this article, we develop a simple test of the home-market effect using detailed drug sales data from the global pharmaceutical industry. The core of our empirical strategy is the observation that a country's exogenous demographic composition can be used as a predictor of the diseases that its inhabitants are most likely to die from and, in turn, the drugs they are most likely to demand. We find that the correlation between predicted home demand and sales abroad is positive and greater than the correlation between predicted home demand and purchases from abroad. In short, countries tend to be net sellers of the drugs they demand the most, as predicted by Linder (1961) and Krugman (1980).