Recent studies suggest that intermediaries like merchants facilitate international trade by reducing fixed trade costs for producers that trade through them instead of exporting or importing directly. This study argues that customs brokers–a type of intermediary rarely studied in economics before–play a similar role by reducing fixed costs of clearing goods through customs for firms that use them instead of self-declaring. Using panel data of Norwegian trade transactions, the paper shows that the majority of manufacturing producers participating in international trade use such brokers, and that the brokers typically handle large trade values on behalf of several different produces. In an econometric analysis, the author finds that the share of a producer’s market specific trade that is self-declared rather than handled by brokers increases with the traded value. This is in line with predictions from theoretical models on trade intermediaries and holds after controlling for observed as well as unobserved factors at the producer, country and product level. Results are similar for exporting and importing, indicating that brokers facilitate both modes of trade.

最近的研究表明，像商人这样的中介机构可以通过降低通过贸易商而不是直接出口或进口的生产商的固定贸易成本来促进国际贸易。这项研究认为，报关经纪人（一种以前很少在经济学中研究过的中介）起着类似的作用，可以降低使用报关商品而不是自我申报的公司通过海关清算货物的固定成本。通过使用挪威贸易交易的面板数据，该论文表明，大多数参与国际贸易的制造业生产商都使用此类经纪人，并且这些经纪人通常代表几种不同的产品来处理较大的贸易价值。在计量经济分析中，作者发现，自我声明而非由经纪人处理的生产者特定于市场的交易的份额随交易价值的增加而增加。这与贸易中介机构理论模型的预测相符，并且在控制了生产者，国家和产品级别的已观察和未观察因素后成立。出口和进口的结果相似，表明经纪人促进了两种贸易方式。