Exporters pay high fixed costs to enter foreign markets, yet the majority will not export beyond one year. What happens to these exporters after they fail abroad? For these firms, exporting likely resulted in heavy profit losses. Despite this, the trade literature largely ignores export failure and views exporting as a simple cost-benefit analysis based on foreign profits and trade costs. This rationale ignores the differential effect export failure may have on financially-constrained firms. This study develops a heterogeneous-firm model with financial constraints and marketing costs to show how export failure can have the following effects: (1) make the liquidity constraint more likely to bind, (2) force financially-constrained firms to limit marketing expenditure and, hence, decrease domestic sales, and (3) induce some firms to default. A Colombian dataset merging firm-level trade and financial data is built to test the propositions of the model. The author finds evidence that export failure has a differential impact on financially-constrained firms. After exporting, financially constrained unsuccessful exporters have a worse cash flow to total assets ratio, lower domestic revenue, slower domestic revenue growth, and a higher probability of going out of business. The findings are robust to comparisons with similar successful exporters and even non-exporters, and an instrumental variable approach.

出口商为进入国外市场付出了高昂的固定成本，但大多数出口不会超过一年。这些出口商在国外失败后会怎样？对于这些公司来说，出口可能导致严重的利润损失。尽管如此，贸易文献在很大程度上忽略了出口失败，并将出口视为基于外国利润和贸易成本的简单成本效益分析。这个理由忽略了出口失败可能对财务受限的公司产生的不同影响。本研究开发了一个具有财务约束和营销成本的异质公司模型，以显示出口失败如何产生以下影响：（1）使流动性约束更有可能受到约束，（2）迫使财务受限的公司限制营销支出和，因此，减少国内销售，并且 (3) 诱使一些公司违约。建立了一个合并公司级贸易和金融数据的哥伦比亚数据集来测试模型的命题。作者发现有证据表明出口失败对财务受限的公司有不同的影响。出口后，财务受限的不成功出口商的现金流与总资产的比率更差，国内收入较低，国内收入增长较慢，倒闭的可能性更高。与类似的成功出口商甚至非出口商以及工具变量法相比，这些发现是稳健的。财务受限的不成功出口商的现金流与总资产的比率更差，国内收入较低，国内收入增长较慢，倒闭的可能性更高。与类似的成功出口商甚至非出口商以及工具变量法相比，这些发现是稳健的。财务受限的不成功出口商的现金流与总资产的比率更差，国内收入较低，国内收入增长较慢，倒闭的可能性更高。与类似的成功出口商甚至非出口商以及工具变量法相比，这些发现是稳健的。