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As cities play important roles in economic growth, the competitive power of foreign trade of cities has gained more and more attentions. Exporting hazard rate, as one dimension of foreign competitive power, shall be specifically measured. And its spatial distribution across cities shall be analyzed. However, few literatures investigates spatial distribution of export hazard rate. This paper estimates firm-level export hazard rates using the Cloglog model based on the data from the Annual Survey of Industrial Enterprises in China, and then aggregate them to city-level. We then analyze the impact of different factors on city-level export hazard rate using the spatial econometrical method. Empirical results show that minimum wage and agglomeration economy spatially affect city-level export hazard rate. Minimum wage significantly increases while agglomeration economy reduces a city¡¯s export harzard rate. However, the spatial relevance of minimum wage and agglomeration economy across space has accordingly significantly contrary impacts. These results imply apparently the existence of the count-competition system in China.

The paper proposes a model to investigate the influences of agglomeration on heterogeneous firms' exporting behaviors. Competition and thus selection effect caused by agglomeration forces less productive firms to exit the market while agglomeration externalities increase firms' productivity and decreases industrial fixed entry, fixed and variable exporting costs, and effective labor wage. The former factors decrease while the latter increase firms' exporting possibilities and sales. The model shows that the composite effect of agglomeration on firms' exports takes on a Parabola-shape pattern. Moreover, higher-productivity firms benefit more export premium from agglomeration, which explains why larger and more productive firms in larger cities are more possible to export and exports more. Empirical results based on data from Chinese Industrial Enterprises between 1998 and 2007 verify the theoretical results. The paper also investigates the influences of different agglomeration patterns on firms exports, including home market effect, urban economies and competition effect and diversification effect. It shows that the former two patterns exert a positive while the latter two have a positive influence on firms' exporting behaviors.

We show in the Chinese Annual Survey of Industrial Firms that size distributions of non-exporters and exporters have different shapes, which can only be explained by assuming that their productivity distributions have different shapes. Empirical estimations verify this assumption. This paper also analyzes the relationship between firms' size and productivity distributions and shows that: 1) productivity and size distributions change accordingly, and 2) productivity is deterministic for size distribution.

The paper proposes a model to investigate the influences of agglomeration on heterogeneous firms' exporting behaviors. In the model, firms are heterogeneous in productivity. Selection effect and agglomeration economies caused by agglomeration increase firms' productivity and decreases industrial entry costs, and factor prices are increased because of agglomeration. The former factors increase while the latter reduces firms' exporting possibilities and sales. The theoretical result shows that the compositive effect is that the influences of productivity on the latter increase with agglomeration level. Empirical results based on data from Chinese Industrial Enterprises between 1998 and 2007 verify the theoretical results. Moreover, the is a critical agglomeration level for each firm (which varies across firms' productivity), so that the influence of agglomeration on a firm' export increases with agglomeration if it's less than this level while decreases if it's larger than it. The paper also estimates the influences of local market effect, urban economies and competition effect on firms' exports and find that they affect firms' exporting behaviors in very complicated modes.

This paper realizes the Melitz-Pareto model using firm-level data from 40 Chinese manufacturing industries from 1998 and 2007. Under the hypothesis that the productivity of firms in each industry follows a Pareto distribution, we show that the domestic sales of non-exporters and the foreign sales of exporters in each industry also follow a Pareto distribution, respectively. We then estimate industrial productivity Pareto distributions, and cut-offs of domestic sales of non-exporters and foreign sales of exporters for each industry. Together this yields all the parameters of the Melitz-Pareto model. Our result shows that the Melitz-Pareto model may not fully apply to Chinese firms.

This paper proposes a two-country trade equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms to investigate the influences of minimum wages and productivity on firms' exports. It shows that the influence of minimum wages on firms' exporting probability and foreign sales is negative while that of firms' productivity on their exports is positive. Econometric analysis based on the Annual Survey of Chinese Industrial Firms as well as the data of minimum wages collected ourselves from 1998 to 2007 verifies these predictions. Holding the other variables constant, if minimum wages and their productivity increase by 100%$, then the elasticity of minimum wage on firms' exporting sales is -8.6% while that of firms' productivity is 75.6%, and firms' exporting possibility decreases by 1.1%$ and increases by 1.6%$, respectively.

This paper investigates how firms' demand uncertainty with capacity constraints and their productivity heterogeneity affect their making-or-buying organizational choices in a general equilibrium framework with incomplete contracts. It shows that a final-good producer may adopt integrating a part of the production of its intermediate input in-house and outsource it at arm's length domestically or abroad simultaneously. Moreover, Five organizational modes, exiting the market, outsourcing in the North, outsourcing in the South, integrating and outsourcing in the North simultaneously, and integrating in the North and outsourcing in the South simultaneously, in turn occur with increase of firm-level productivity, as well as its demand uncertainty. Influences of uncertainty and productivity on prevalence of various organizational modes are also explored.