Essays on Export Dynamics

This thesis consists of three empirical essays on export dynamics. In particular, it provides an analysis of the importance and determinants of the expansion into new destinations, which is a key determinant of export growth. The dynamics of new destinations expansion has until recently been neglected as a relevant topic in international trade. However, the acknowledgement that entry into exporting entails significant sunk costs, together with the empirical fact that firms and countries seem to follow non random paths in the entry and expansion into new destinations has opened a new avenue of research which this thesis exploits directly.;The first essay provides an empirical decomposition of export growth in developing economies using product level data. It shows that the expansion of exports is importantly and consistently explained by the entry and expansion into new destinations, explaining on average close to 40% of export growth.;The second essay provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of destination specific entry at the product level. In particular it analyzes the role of gravity variables, which relate the origin and the destination, and the role of extended gravity variables which relate a destination with previously served destinations. The finding that extended gravity plays an important role, particularly through the experience in bordering countries, implies a network of geographically close served destinations, which goes beyond the relevance of traditional gravity.;The third essay provides a firm level empirical structural model of destination specific export entry. Using data for a specific sector in Chile it estimates how gravity affects sunk and fixed costs of exporting for a given specific destination and how the export history in a related destination reduces these entry and fixed costs. Given that the dynamic essence of the problem and the fact that history matters the choice set for the discrete choice model becomes unfeasible to compute, so the paper uses moment inequalities to infer from actual firm behavior the export fixed and sunk costs. The paper finds that sunk costs of exporting vary significantly depending on the destination and that extended gravity effects can be significant in reducing these costs.