Posts as Trade Facilitators

In this paper, we examine an innovative postal export regime that involves both a streamlining of export procedures and provision of intermediation services to investigate how firms' react to changing trade costs and whether and how these firms learn. In so doing, we use a unique dataset that consists of the entire universe of Peru's export transactions over the period 1999-2014 including both regular shipments and postal shipments. We find that the new export mode has been associated with increased and more diversified regional exports, higher entry and exit rates, more export experimentation, and learning both within and across firms.