Firms selling products abroad usually have to interact with several border agencies that develop multiple trade regulations and oversee their compliance. These regulations establish the procedures that these firms have to follow and the documents that they have to obtain, fill in, and submit for...

We examine transaction-level Peruvian import data to show that firms are subject to significant costs of port-of-entry delays. At the transaction level, we observe the time it takes a shipment to clear each step in the entry process. Our theory shows conditions under which observed entry times...

Trade facilitation policies intend to simplify administrative processes and accelerate the handling of shipments across borders. Recent research shows that these policies have substantial effects on trade flows. In this chapter, we discuss what the existing evidence for trade implies for the...

In this paper, we estimate the trade effects of a transit system upgrading that streamlines border processing in developing countries. Our empirical approach combines transaction level export data from El Salvador with unique data that distinguishes export flows that were processed on the...

International trade is subject to information incompleteness. Firms must therefore engage in a costly search process to find business partners. Online platforms can reduce these search costs and thereby favor firms exports. We examine whether this is actually the case and the underlying...

In the global recession of 2009, exports declined precipitously in many countries. We illustrate with firm-level data for Belgium and Peru that the decline was very sudden and almost entirely due to lower export sales by existing exporters. After the recession, exports rebounded almost equally...