Working Paper: NBER ID: w9936
Authors: Tibor Besede; Thomas J. Prusa
Abstract: This paper employs survival analysis to study the duration of US imports. We find that the median duration of exporting a product to the US is very short, on the order to two to four years. Our results also indicate that there is negative duration dependence meaning that if a country is able to survive in the exporting market for the first few years it will face a very small probability of failure and will export the product for a long period of time. This result holds across countries and industries. We find that our results are not only robust to aggregation but are strengthened by aggregation. That is, as we aggregate from product level trade data to SITC industry level trade data the estimated survival increases. We rank countries by their survival experience and show that our rankings are strongly correlated with the rankings in Feenstra and Rose (2002), implying that product cycle followers also experience particularly short duration.
Keywords: No keywords provided
JEL Codes: F14; F19; C14; C41
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| initial years of trading (F10) | survival duration (C41) |
| survival duration (C41) | probability of continuing to export (F10) |
| duration of trade relationships (F10) | hazard rate for trade relationships that survive the first five years (C41) |
| aggregation of data (C80) | estimated survival durations (C41) |
| longer survival experiences (C41) | technological leadership in the product cycle (O33) |