Quality Choice: Effects of Trade, Transportation Cost, and Relative Country Size,” mimeo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We introduce a generalized iceberg transportation cost, which combines per-unit and ad-valorem components, into a monopolistic competition model of trade with endogenous quality choice. In equilibrium, quality increases in per-unit component of the iceberg and in firm-level export share. We derive an equilibrium where the export share and thus the quality of exports decrease in the exporter country size. Next we show empirically on the sample of US imports that larger countries tend to export lower priced goods especially in those industries where transportation cost has a larger per-unit component. This finding raises a possibility that increasing returns play a larger role in international trade than previously thought. This is because the customary approach that uses value of trade to identify the home market effects might underestimate the effect of country size because price and quantity are effected in opposite directions. This supposition is borne out by the data. Home market effect is present in about a quarter to a third more industries when volume of exports is measured by quantity rather than value.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.034 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".