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More than half of all US import relationships begin with less than $10,000 annually. The median relationship is observed to last just one year. The incidence and duration of these relationships are consistent with a search model of international trade. The preponderance of small starting relationships reveals uncertainty present in formation of trade relationships. Initial size, reliability, and search costs matter and play an important role. Larger initial purchase results in longer relationships. Higher reliability and lower search costs lead to larger initial purchases and longer relationships.JEL Codes: F14, C41

We employ survival analysis to study the duration of US imports. Our findings indicate that international trade is far more dynamic than previously thought. We find the median duration of exporting a product to the US is very short, on the order of two to four years. There is negative duration dependence-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 likely export the product for a long period of time. The results hold across countries and industries and are robust to aggregation.

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.

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.

We investigate the extent to which antidumping actions eliminate trade altogether. Using quarterly 10-digit HS-level export data for products involved in U.S. antidumping cases we find that antidumping actions increase the hazard rate by more than 50%. We find strong evidence of investigation effects with the impact during the initiation and preliminary duty phases considerably larger than once final duties are imposed. There are also important differences with respect to the size of duties with cases with large duties experiencing very large investigation effects. We show the antidumping (AD)-affected countries are less likely to return to the market even after the AD order is removed. (JEL F13, F14) * We would like to thank seminar and conferences participants at