Many new exporters give up exporting very shortly, despite substantial entry costs; others shoot up foreign sales and expand to new destinations. We develop a model based on experimentation to rationalize these and other dynamic patterns of exporting firms. We posit that individual export profitability, while initially uncertain, is positively correlated over time and across destinations. This leads to "sequential exporting," where the possibility of profitable expansion at the intensive and extensive margins makes initial entry costs worthwhile despite high failure rates. Firm-level evidence from Argentina's customs, which would be difficult to reconcile with existing models, strongly supports this mechanism. Sequential exporting also has important and novel policy implications: a reduction in trade barriers has delayed effects, while also promoting entry in third markets. This trade externality poses challenges for the quantification of the effects of trade liberalization programs and implies that the consequences of international trade agreements are significantly richer than traditional models suggest. JEL Codes: F10; D21; F13 Keywords: Export dynamics, experimentation, uncertainty, learning, trade liberalization * We thank Costas Arkolakis, David Atkin, Sami Berlinski, Jordi Blanes-i-Vidal, John Bluedorn, Holger Breinlich, Svetlana Demidova, Nic de Roos, Peter Egger, Robert Elliott, Daniel Ferreira, Rodrigo Fuentes, Martin Gervais, Juan Carlos Hallak, James Harrigan, Beata Javorcik, Marc-Andreas Muendler, Peter Neary, Brent Neiman, Dimitra Petropoulou, Horst Raff, Steve Redding, Frédéric Robert-Nicoud, Mark Roberts, Ina Simonovska, Thierry Verdier, Zhihong Yu, and seminar participants at various institutions and conferences for valuable comments and suggestions. We also thank the support of the Chair Jacquemin of the Université Catholique de Louvain in choosing this paper for its annual award at the 2009 European Trade Study Group Meeting. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the British Academy and the ESRC.

Using detailed data on trade and tariffs from 1992-2007, we examine how the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement has affected trade with non-members and external tariffs facing non-members. First, we examine the effect of preferential and external tariff reduction on import growth from ASEAN insiders and outsiders across HS 6-digit industries. We find no evidence that preferential liberalization has led to lower import growth from non-members. Second, we examine the relationship between preferential tariff reduction and MFN tariff reduction. We find that preferential liberalization tends to precede external tariff liberalization. To examine whether this tariff complementarity is a result of simultaneous decision making, we use the scheduled future preferential tariff reductions (agreed to in 1992) as instruments for actual preferential tariff changes after the Asia crisis. The results remain unchanged, suggesting that there is a causal relationship between preferential and MFN tariff reduction. We also find that external liberalization was relatively sharper in the products where preferences are likely to be most damaging, proving further support for a causal effect. Overall, our results imply that the ASEAN agreement has been a force for broader liberalization.

Despite of its importance for the economy, stock ownership by households is poorly understood. Recent research has uncovered that expectations of stock market returns by individuals strongly correlate with stock ownership. This paper reports new …ndings from a survey which contains novel data on stock-market return expectations, individual information sets and stock ownership, for a representative sample by age and wealth ('Mode de vie des Français', TNS 2007). Individual information sets measure in probabilistic terms the beliefs that individuals hold about equity returns over the …ve years prior to the time of the survey (March 2007). We …nd that (i) expected returns and information sets are very heterogeneous, hump-shaped in age, higher for males and increasing in wealth; (ii) stock ownership increases with the subjective conditional expectation of a positive return; and (iii) that information is costly acquired, sourced from social interactions, professionals, specialised media access, or own past experience, and is consistent with rational inattention amongst optimists and income constrained respondents.

We explore empirically whether earnings uncertainty and borrowing constraints deter households from the stock market, consistent with the predictions of theoretical studies of portfolio choice in the presence of uninsurable earnings. Since recent extensions highlight the importance of the correlation between earnings and financial risks, here we use a self-assessed proxy from the DELTA-TNS 2002 cross-sectional survey to empirically assess the impact. Although income risk does not affect the participation decision of households' reporting a negative correlation, it does lower the participation of those who report a nonnegative sign, consistent with economic theory predictions.

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