This paper aims to understand the pathways by which exporters become entities that sell multiple goods to multiple customers. To understand firms' export strategies, we analyse new trade flows -- new seller-buyer-product combinations -- of individual exporters. Our first finding highlights that these new trade flows are an important margin for firms of all size classes, accounting for approximately 62\% of their overall trade flows. Classifying new trade flows into going-wide (introducing new products) and going-deep (reaching new buyers for existing products), we find that the dominant margin of export expansion depends on the size and life-cycle stage of exporters; smaller firms rely relatively more on going-wide and large firms more on going-deep. We also demonstrate that selling new products is different from selling existing products: Firms target new products to a single, often new, buyer. To rationalize these facts, we propose a conceptual framework where firms allocate scarce sales personnel between selling existing products to more buyers and matching with new buyers for introducing new products. We empirically test and confirm the model's key predictions. In particular, we use the 2015 Swiss exchange rate shock and show that going-deep is more pronounced as an export strategy when a firm's effective market size is relatively larger. The findings suggest varying scope and size for firms born in different phases of globalisation.

This paper uses the implementation of a TRIPS compliant patent regime in India to study the effect of stronger patent protection on innovation and market power. Exploiting cross-industry variation in the reliance on patents as an appropriation mechanism, we find that the reform led to an increase in patent applications and higher investment in research and development for firms more exposed to the reform. We also estimate an increase in average firm-product level markups post reform which can be mainly attributed to lower marginal costs, not higher prices. Our results indicate that an increase in process innovations post-reform and output expansion contribute to these cost savings.

Can being innovative help firms to shield themselves from the disruptive effects of a recession? This paper finds that in industries hit severely by the Great Recession, firms with prior investment in R&D outperformed non-innovative firms during the recession. The resilience of innovative firms is explained by their ability to change their product base through product innovation. Innovative firms do not seem to engage in process innovation or lower marginal costs and prices to adapt to a negative demand shock. The findings are not attenuated by alternative explanations of resilience such as better access to capital, pre-existing product and market scope of innovative firms, or differences in labour adjustment costs. The paper, thus, provides evidence for how investment in R&D today makes firms capable of swiftly developing new products to cope with a dramatically changed external environment.

We study how acquisition-FDI during economic crises affects R&D investments of target firms as compared to acquisitions made during periods of economic growth. Using a panel of Spanish firms, we find that foreign multinationals cherry-pick the best domestic firms, irrespective of timing of acquisition. Using matching and difference-in-difference regressions, we find that firms acquired during crises experience smaller declines in R&D than those acquired during periods of growth.  Our results are consistent with the opportunity cost theory of R&D over the business cycle, as we also find that crisis-acquired firms prioritize new product creation over achieving economies of scale.

Using data for Indian firms, we find that there is self-selection of more productive firms into exporting. Firms that make the transition become bigger, but there is little evidence of improvements in productivity right after exporting commences. However, there is evidence of improvement in productivity of export starters in comparison to their productivity a couple of years before they begin to export.