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Title: Shipment frequency of exporters and demand uncertainty: An inventory management approach

Author(s): Gábor Békés, Lionel Fontagné, Balázs Muraközy and Vincent Vicard

Publication Date: December 2015

Keyword(s): firms, frequency of trade, gravity, inventory model and transport costs

Programme Area(s): International Trade and Regional Economics

Abstract: This paper studies how exporting firms optimize their inventory management in order to adapt to the uncertainty stemming from demand volatility. We motivate our analysis with a stochastic inventory management framework. We use monthly micro data on French exporters and find that greater uncertainty is associated with lower sales volume. We decompose this effect to its two margins, the number of shipments and average shipment size to find that the number of shipments decreases more quickly as uncertainty increases which is in line with firms adjusting their inventory policy as well as their exported volume as a result of increased uncertainty. Also, uncertainty was found to matter more at distant markets where the uncertainty between firm actions and the arrival of the products is the largest.

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Bibliographic Reference

Békés, G, Fontagné, L, Muraközy, B and Vicard, V. 2015. 'Shipment frequency of exporters and demand uncertainty: An inventory management approach'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=11013