Surviving the U.S. Import Market: The Role of Product Differentiation

We examine the extent that product differentiation affects the duration of US import trade relationships. Applying nonparametric and semiparametric techniques to highly disaggregated product-level data we estimate that the hazard rate is at least 18 percent higher for homogenous goods than for differentiated products. Put another way, the median survival time for trade relationships involving differentiated products is five years as compared to two years for homogenous products. We find that our results are not only highly robust but often are strengthened under alternative specifications. For instance, if we define trade relationships using industry-level rather than product-level data we find that the hazard rate is 30-35 percent higher for homogenous goods than for differentiated products. We also find that the survival ranking across product types holds across individual industries. We show that dropping the smallest trade relationships further accentuates the differences among product types. We also control for the possible measurement error in measuring spell lengths and the role of multiple spell relationships and find that in all cases the differences among products types are greater than in our benchmark analysis.

On the Duration of Trade

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.

The Role of Extensive and Intensive Margins and Export Growth

We investigate and compare countries' export growth based on their performance at the extensive and intensive export margins. Our empirical approach is motivated by an extension to the Melitz (2003) model of heterogeneous firms in which exporters are subject to a one-time sunk cost and also a per-period fixed cost. With imperfect information a firm may enter export markets but shortly exit when it learns its per- period fixed costs. We apply this insight to disaggregated export data and confirm that indeed most export relationships are very short lived. We then show that the survival issue is a significant factor in explaining differences in long run export performance. We find that developing countries would experience significantly higher export growth if they were able to improve their performance with respect to the two key components of the intensive margin: survival and deepening.

Age Effects and Heuristics in Decision Making

Using controlled experiments, we examine how individuals make choices when faced with multiple options. Choice tasks are designed to mimic the selection of health insurance, prescription drug, or retirement savings plans. In our experiment, available options can be objectively ranked allowing us to examine optimal decision making. First, the probability of a person selecting the optimal option declines as the number of options increases, with the decline being more pronounced for older subjects. Second, heuristics differ by age with older subjects relying more on suboptimal decision rules. In a heuristics validation experiment, older subjects make worse decisions than younger subjects.experiments, decision making, optimal choice, age effects, heuristics

Decision-making Strategies and Performance among Seniors

Using paper and pencil experiments administered in senior centers, we examine decision-making performance in multi-attribute decision problems. We find a significant decline in performance with age due to reduced reliance on common heuristics among our oldest subjects. Subjects in their early sixties incorporate a wide array of heuristics, septuagenarians employ progressively fewer strategies, and subjects in their 80s make nearly random selections. However, we find that increasing the number of options in a decision problem increases the number of heuristics brought to the task. This challenges the choice overload view that people give up when confronted with too much choice.

Age Effects and Heuristics in Decision Making

We examine in controlled experiments how individuals make choices when faced with multiple options. The choice tasks mimic the selection of health insurance, prescription drug, or retirement savings plans. However, in our experiment, the available options can be objectively ranked. We find that the probability of a person selecting the optimal option declines as the number of options increases, with the decline more pronounced for older subjects. Heuristics seem to differ by age with older subjects relying more on suboptimal decision rules. Behavior consistent with the estimated decision rules is observed in an out-of-sample experiment.

Export Differentiation in Transition Economies

I investigate changes in the structure of trade of seventeen transition economies between 1996 and 2006, focusing on differences across three types of products -- homogeneous goods, reference priced goods, and differentiated products. I examine shares of exports of each type of good, intensive and extensive margins, and the hazard of exporting. While there are cross-country differences in the distribution of export shares and in intensive and extensive margins, largest differences exist in the hazard of exporting. There are significant differences in the hazard both across countries and time

The role of NAFTA and returns to scale in export duration

While exports within NAFTA face a lower hazard, its onset has increased the hazard of exporting between the members, though intra-NAFTA exports still enjoy a lower hazard. There are differences in the timing of the effect of NAFTA across the three members. Unlike the effect on Canadian exports, the effect on Mexican and U.S. exports is persistent. Exports of increasing-returns-to-scale manufacturing products faced the highest hazard across all three members. The effect of NAFTA on the hazard of exporting each of the three returns to scale type of products is exporter specific with no uniform patterns

The Effects of European Integration on the Stability of International Trade: A Duration Perspective

I examine the effects European integration has had on intra-EU trade relationships between 1962 and 2005. I find that the stability of intra-EU trade relationships as reflected by their duration has been negatively affected by the persistent integration with duration decreasing and the hazard of trade ceasing increasing. The 1986 and 1995 expansions as well as the creation of the economic union in 1999 reduced the hazard, but not by a large enough magnitude to offset the increased hazard due to earlier integration actions. On the whole, intra-EU relationships have become shorter. This is largely due to the reduction in trade costs brought about by integration, which has enabled a plethora of short and previously cost-prohibitive relationships. This conclusion is supported by the tremendous growth of new relationships under the various incarnations of the European Union