Does the partial year effect invalidate the evidence on new exporters?

The literature shows that new exporters have small levels of exports relative to regular exporters upon entry, and, if they survive, they have very high export growth rates between the entry year and the next year. However, a recent paper by Bernard et al. (2014), using Peruvian data, has shown that these empirical facts might be biased by the partial year effect firms that start to export late during the year have a lower level of exports upon entry and a higher growth rate between the entry year and the next year. In this paper, we test the partial year effect for Spain, a country with a much larger number of exporters and a more diversified export structure than Peru. We confirm that the partial year undervalues entry levels and overvalues growth rates. However, despite these adjustments, new exporters still have much lower export values and much higher growth rates than regular exporters.