The article by Costas Arkolakis and Marc-Andreas Muendler builds on
the rapidly growing literature on the empirics of firm-level trade. A key
difficulty of work in this area is the generally limited availability of relevant
data sets. To the extent that data are available at all, the data are
often only accessible to national researchers under strict rules. Also, firmlevel
data sets frequently differ across countries in the list and definition of
variables, the level of disaggregation, the period that is covered and other
features of design. As a result, many empirical findings are derived from
national data only, which are then sought to be replicated, under different
settings, for other countries. Arkolakis and Muendler provide one of the
rare attempts to produce comparable results using data from multiple
sources, thereby addressing the associated robustness concerns directly.
Analyzing data for four countries, Brazil, Chile, Denmark and Norway,
they present a number of interesting stylized facts on patterns of market
entry and sales by destination