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We study the impact of foreign market entry and exit by firms on the trajectory of U.S. exports during and after the Great Recession. Using confidential micro-data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that incumbent exporters were primarily responsible for the changes in aggregate foreign sales during these years. While there was a substantial decline in the number of firms that sold abroad in the midst of the crisis, new exporters during the recovery compensated for this by having larger foreign sales. Thus, while changes in foreign market participation drove substantial shifts in the variety of U.S. goods that were exported, overall they were less important for the trajectory of total foreign sales over time. Keywords Great recession * Business cycles * Exports * Entry * Exit * Firm dynamics JEL Classification F10 * F40 * E32 * E44 * J2, 1 Introduction The sharp decline in aggregate international trade during the Great Recession has garnered significant attention. As shown by Levchenko et al. (2010), the collapse was unprecedented in its [...]

Typical censoring models have mass points at the upper or lower tails, or at both tails, of an otherwise continuous outcome distribution. In contrast, we consider a censoring model with a mass point in the interior of the outcome distribution. We refer to this mass point as “bunching” and use it to estimate model parameters. For example, economic theory suggests that, for increasing marginal income tax rates, many taxpayers will report income exactly at the threshold where the tax rate increases. This translates into a censoring model with bunching at the threshold. The size of this mass point of taxpayers can be used to estimate an elasticity parameter that summarizes taxpayers’ responses to taxes. In this article, we introduce the command bunching, which implements new nonparametric and semiparametric identification methods for estimating elasticities developed by Bertanha, McCallum, and Seegert (2021, Technical Report 2021-002, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System). These methods rely on weaker assumptions than what are currently made in the literature and result in meaningfully different estimates of the elasticity.