Does Experience Facilitate Entry into New Export Destinations?

Using a large panel dataset that covers 116 countries and 5013products over the period 1998-2010, this study evaluates the effects of export experience on the geographic expansion of China ＂s exports. The results suggest that past export experience in geographically close and culturally similar markets plays a crucial role in.facilitating new market entry, and the positive spillover effects are more pronounced for incumbent and successful products. The results also indicate that spillovers from export experience are market-specific and product- specific, and they are limited to within the same product class and the same market, with little cross-group effects. Finally, there is no strong evidence that export experience is more important for differentiated products than for homogeneous products, and the positive spillover effects are remarkable for both categories of products.

The Performance of Chinese Private Firms in Coping with a Global Financial Crisis： Who Is Best Positioned？

Using organizational flexibility as a research lens, we investigate how private firms, especially SMEs, in China cope with the 2008 financial crisis. Testing data from a large sample of private firms （N=3,459） by difference-indifferences analysis, we find that firms with industrial diversification, geographic expansion and political connections perform better during the crisis than those without. These results are less affected by self-selection problems （as the abrupt crisis provides a natural experiment） and hold up against endogeneity and several other challenges in robustness tests. The findings offer important implications for researchers, business owners, policy makers and future research.