Posts as Trade Facilitators

Date
Jun 2016
In this paper, we examine an innovative postal export regime that involvesboth a streamlining of export procedures and provision of intermediation
services to investigate how firms' react to changing trade costs and
whether and how these firms learn. In so doing, we use a unique dataset
that consists of the entire universe of Peru's export transactions over the
period 1999-2014 including both regular shipments and postal shipments.
We find that the new export mode has been associated with increased and
more diversified regional exports, higher entry and exit rates, more export
experimentation, and learning both within and across firms.