Exporters During the Trade Collapse: The (Surprising) Resiliency of the Small Exporter

How did small exporters fare relative to large exporters during the 2008-09 crisis? Examining the performance of Mexican exporters reveals that the crisis did not make smaller exporters more likely to exit, grow less, or expand less their product line relative to larger exporters. Workhorse models of trade would predict the opposite. The same models, however, are consistent with the data before the crisis: within industry, (i) firm exit rate is decreasing in size; (ii) conditional on survival, export growth is decreasing in size; (iii) product line expansion is increasing in size.