NBER Publications by Tibor Besedes

We investigate and compare countries' export performance based on their performance at the extensive and intensive export margins. We decompose these margins into three distinct components: establishing new partners and markets, having relationships survive or persist, and deepening existing relationships. We show that despite the large number of new exporting relationships, differences along the extensive margin have very little impact on long-run export growth. By contrast, we find developing countries would have had significantly higher export growth were they able to improve their performance with respect to the two key components of the intensive margin: survival and deepening.