Few firms import, even when formal trade barriers are low and despite substantial potential gains. Likely reasons are uncertainty and informational frictions, creating scope for local peers to affect new importers. We explore this hypothesis using data on French imports by...

How do exporters expand their product scope and geographical presence? We argue that new exporters are uncertain about their profitability in different countries and products, but learn it as they start to export. As a consequence, exporters add products and countries sequentially, in an...

Is ownership change an opportunity for new owners to make systematic changes in the workforce of the acquired plant? We document changes to the workforce along observable and unobservable dimensions of worker quality around ownership change using matched employeremployee data. We observe above...

We show that in successful episodes of export market entry, there are statistically and economically significant post-entry dynamics of quantities, but no post-entry dynamics of markups. This suggests that shifts in demand play an important role in successful entry, but that firms do not use...

Multinational affiliates are more productive than domestic firms, so how do they affect a host country through the labor market? We use data for Norway to show that the labor market is characterized by a job ladder, with multinationals on the upper rungs. We calibrate a general equilibrium job...

This paper replicates Poole (2013) using comprehensive Norwegian and Irish register data. Our results largely confirm the evidence documented in Poole for Brazil which suggests that when workers leave multinationals and are rehired at domestic establishments, the wages of their new coworkers who...