Coping with the Crisis: Recent Evolution in Danish Firms' International Trade Involvement, 2000-2010

Using a highly disaggregated firm-product-destination level data from Denmark, we document salient features of Danish international production in the recent decade. These include systematic variation in export participation of firms across industries, positive correlation between the scope (number of products exported and markets served) and scale of exporting activities, considerable dominance of multi-product and multi-destination firms, existence of carry-along trade, the prevalence of core and peripheral products in exports, a small role of economy-wide entry and exit of firms and products, and a sizable role of firm-level adding and dropping of products and product-destination combinations as a margin of trade adjustment. Finally, we show that firms responded to the latest economic shock mainly by adjusting the scale of exports and imports. At the same time, changing their products and productdestination combinations helped them to mitigate the negative effects of the shock.