Chiara Tomasi

Intermediaries in International Trade: Direct Versus Indirect Modes of Export

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different products than manufacturing exporters. In particular, high market-specific fixed costs of exporting, the (lack of) quality of the general contracting environment and product-specific factors play important roles in explaining the existence of export intermediaries. These underlying differences between direct and intermediary exporters have important consequences for trade flows. The ability of export intermediaries to overcome country and product fixed costs means that they can more easily respond along the extensive margin to external shocks. Intermediaries and direct exporters respond differently to exchange rate fluctuations both in terms of the total value of shipments and the number of products exported as well as in terms of prices and quantities. Aggregate exports to destinations with high shares of indirect exports are much less responsive to changes in the real exchange rate than are exports to countries served primarily by direct exporters.

Exporting Under Financial Constraints: Margins, Switching Dynamics and Prices

Using data on cross border transactions together with an informative measure of financing constraints this paper provides new evidence that limited access to external capital narrows the scale of foreign sales, the exporters’ product scope and the number of trade partners. It shows that constrained firms have a reduced probability of adding and a higher probability of dropping products and destinations. Further it documents that constrained firms sell their products at higher prices as compared to unconstrained firms. All the results are robust to specific control for unobserved heterogeneity, self-selection into export and potential endogeneity of the financial constraints proxy.

Export price adjustments under financial constraints

Exploiting data on product-destination level transactions of a large panel of Italian firms, we provide new evidence on the effect of financial constraints on price variation across exporters. Controlling for firm characteristics and endogeneity, constrained exporters charge higher prices than unconstrained firms exporting in the same product-destination market. The positive price difference increases with horizontal differentiation of products, while it reduces in vertically differentiated products, where there is more scope for quality adjustments. The results are consistent with constrained firms exploiting demand rigidities to keep prices up in the attempt to sustain revenues and escape the constraints.

Global Sourcing and Business & Social Networks: Quality Heterogeneity and Firms’ Efficiency

A distinct feature of globalization is the pivotal role played by the internationalization of production processes (Feenstra and Hanson, 1996; Hummels et al., 2001). A growing empirical literature provides evidence on the effects of global sourcing on firms’ efficiency via specialization, learning, variety and quality upgrading mechanisms.

Export Intermediaries and Adjustments to Exchange Rate Movements

Building on a heterogeneous-firm model a la Melitz (2003), we propose a theory of intermediaries in international trade which rationalizes the available evidence on both aggregate and firm-level exports as well as their responsiveness to exchange rate movements. We introduce double marginalization for goods traded indirectly, i.e. through intermediaries, and local distribution costs for all exporting firms, either intermediaries or direct exporters. This leads to heterogeneous markups, pricing-to-market and to a lower degree of exchange rate pass-through for goods exported by intermediaries. This result, validated on Italian firm-level trade data, is consistent with productivity sorting in the export mode and with the propensity of high productivity firms to absorb more exchange rate movements in their markups. We also explore how direct and intermediary export ows to a given destination react to exchange rate movements along the extensive margin of adjustment. Consistently with our theory, we find evidence of a larger variation in the overall number of varieties traded along the intermediary channel.