There is extensive empirical evidence pointing to the exsistence of sunk costs to exporting. Only higher productivity firms can profitably cover these and enter export markets. This is the standard explanation for the regularity with which econometric analyses reports that exporters are more...

As a result of the rapid growth of microeconometric studies of exporting firms, we now know quite a lot about the performance dynamics of firms that enter export markets. We know much less about what happens to performance when firms exit. We apply a difference-in-differences methodology based...