Recent models of international trade show that trade costs are important determinants of exporting decisions. These theories, however, do not take into account that experienced firms may have lower trade costs, or that new exporters may reduce these costs by observing other exporters' decisions....

Recent models of trade with firm heterogeneity predict that opening to trade reduces the number of firms, increases the average size of firms, and decreases firms’ markups. This paper uses a large dataset for 28 manufacturing industries and 46 countries to test these predictions. The...

Summary This paper uses plant-level data from the manufacturing sector of Chile to investigate whether foreign technology licensing generates productivity spillovers to other plants in the same industry and to other plants in vertically related industries (potential suppliers and buyers of...

Many empirical studies based on plant-level data have found that firms that enter the export markets are more productive than non-exporters and that this difference in productivity is achieved before firms become involved in exporting. These findings have challenged the traditional view that...

This paper uses plant–level data from Chile to show that an increase in sector–wide exports decreases the survival probability of exporters, but not that of non–exporters. We argue that this result can be explained by the fact that exporters and non-exporters use factors of production in...