In a recent paper, with my co-authors Meredith Crowley and Lu Han, we investigate how the increased trade policy uncertainty following the Brexit referendum has impacted the exporting decisions of UK firms.
We analyse decisions to both enter into and iran rcs data exit from exporting to the EU across the 8,000 different types of products that the UK exports to the EU. We find that firms have been less likely to enter and more likely to exit from exporting goods facing high `threat point’ tariffs. Overall, we estimate that over 5,200 firms did not enter into exporting new products and almost 4,000 firms exited from exporting products to the EU in 2016.
These magnitudes are economically significant, implying that entry into exporting to the EU would have been 5.1% higher and exit 4.3% lower in 2016 if UK firms had not faced increased `threat point’ tariffs in 2016.
To conduct our analysis we construct a new database of firm exporting decisions to the EU using the universe of UK customs transactions data sourced from the Overseas Trade Statistics in the HMRC datalab.