Do new exporters grow so fast?

The literature shows that new exporters have small levels of exports relative to regular exporters upon entry, and, if they survive, they have very high export growth rates between the entry year and the next year. However, these empirical facts might be biased by the partial year effect: firms that start to export late during the year have a lower level of exports upon entry and a higher growth rate between the entry year and the next year. We test the partial year effect for the whole universe of Spanish new exporters during the period 2002 to 2012. We confirm that the partial year undervalues entry levels and overvalues growth rates.