Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP11013
Authors: Gbor Bks; Lionel Fontagn; Balzs Murakzy; Vincent Vicard
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.
Keywords: firms; frequency of trade; gravity; inventory model; transport costs
JEL Codes: D40; F14; R41
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| demand uncertainty (D89) | shipment frequency (L87) |
| demand uncertainty (D89) | total export value (F10) |
| demand uncertainty (D89) | number of shipments (L87) |
| demand uncertainty (D89) | average shipment size (L87) |
| shipment frequency (L87) | total export value (F10) |