Essays on Patterns of International Trade

This paper investigates how the fraction of exporting firms among domestic firms in a country differs across industries, depending on the country’s comparative advantage. Although it is a known stylized fact that some firms export while others do not, the variation of the shares of exporters across industries, as well as across countries within the same industry, has been little explored. This paper derives and tests one relationship between exporter share and the underlying sources of its heterogeneity across industries, with a particular focus on relative factor intensity. In the context of the international trade literature, this paper extends the HeckscherOhlin theory of comparative advantage to the issue of selection of exporter firms by providing new empirical evidence.