Export Dynamics in Colombia: Firm-Level Evidence

By Jonathan Eaton, M. Eslava, Maurice Kugler, J. Tybout. 2007

317 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using transactions-level customs data from Colombia, we study firm-specific export patterns over the period 1996-2005. Our data allow us to track firms' entry and exit into and out of individual destination markets, as well as their revenues from selling there. We find that, in a typical year, nearly half of all Colombian exporters were not exporters in the previous year. These new exporters tend to be extremely small in terms of their overall contribution to export revenues, and most do not continue exporting in the following year. Hence export sales are dominated by a small number of very large and stable exporters. Nonetheless, out of each cohort of new exporters, a fraction of firms go on to expand their foreign sales very rapidly, and over the period of less than a decade, these successful new exporters account for almost half of total export expansion. Finally, we find that new exporters begin in a single foreign market and, if they survive, gradually expand into additional destinations. The geographic expansion paths they follow, and their likelihood of survival as exporters, depend on their initial destination market.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fecffd69b4366ecbfe86d2a8ede3cc9093de6a94

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Citations in the corpus

The Empirics of Firm Heterogeneity and International Trade (2012, methodology): “(2010) show that patterns of multinational activity by rm and destination market exhibit a number of similarities with the patterns of trade by rm and destination market in Eaton et al. (2011a). In particular, while total a liate sales and the number of foreign a liates are less”
Firms in international trade (2016, methodology): “First, the alreadymentioned work by Fernandes et al. (2015) uses data from the World Bank covering 50 developing countries to evaluate trade growth on the intensive and extensive margin. They develop a Melitz-style model of exporting, but with a log-normal distribution of productivity. They estimate”
The Role of Extensive and Intensive Margins and Export Growth (2007, background): “In other words for every region more than 50 percent of all export relationships fail within the first two years.(10) By the end of the second year of service about 53% of U.”
Exporting under trade policy uncertainty: Theory and evidence (2014, background): “Otherwise, no trade is 15The evidence of firm level entry following trade liberalizations from detailed firm studies such as Eaton et al. (2007) is confirmed in disaggregated product level studies such as Kehoe and Ruhl (2009) and Debaere and Mostashari (2010).”
The intensive and extensive margins of trade decomposing exports growth differences across Spanish regions (2010, methodology): “First, we further decompose the extensive margin into an entry and a value 3 Another line of research uses firm-level data to measure the role of the extensive margin and the intensive margin in a specific country (Eaton et al (2007) for Colombia; Gleeson and Ruane (2007) for Ireland). component.”
The Charmed Life of Superstar Exporters: Survey Evidence on Firms and Trade Policy (2017, background): “Industries featuring differentiated products, in contrast, witness sharp intra-industry reallocations of profit in the wake of trade liberalization (Aw, Chung, and Roberts 2000; Berthou and Vicard 2015; Eaton et al. 2007; Girma, Greenaway, and Kneller 2003; Pavcnik 2002).”
Trade Diversification, Income, and Growth: What Do We Know? (2013, unknown): “Subsequent studies (Bernard and Jensen 1999; Eaton et al. 2004, 2007; Helpman et al. 2004; Demidova 2006) confirmed the importance of selection effects at the firm level.”
Can Production Subsidies Explain China's Export Performance? Evidence from Firm-Level Data (2009, unknown): “For example, Eckaus (2006) discusses Chinese policies of subsidising loss-making SOEs, and a firm’s profit or productivity performance is likely to be correlated with its exporting status.”