The paper investigates the dynamics of export relationships – defined as shipments by a given firm to a given destination in a given year – in a panel of almost 25,000 French exporters over the five-year period 1995-1999. It describes how the relationships evolve over time, presenting a...

Using French firm-level trade data, we provide empirical support for a heterogeneous firm model in which exporting requires finding a local partner in each market: contracts are incomplete, exporters must learn the reliability of their partners through experience, and export behaviour is...