This timely Handbook comprehensively explores the complex relationships between trade and economic performance in developing countries, illustrating that it is not trade per se that is important but the context, at the firm, country and regional level, in which trade occurs. The Handbook on...

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...

Several studies examine the patterns and determinants of entry and exit in manufacturing industries. Not much work exists on entry and exit in international markets. This paper uses Chilean data to analyze the industry-level determinants of entry and exit in export markets. First, we show as...

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...