Existing empirical evidence suggest that entrepreneurs are optimists, a finding researchers often interpret as evidence of a behavioral bias in entrepreneurial decision-making. We revisit this claim by analyzing an unusually large survey dataset (180,814 responses) that allows us to create a...

Recent empirical and theoretical studies have suggested that consumption growth reacts asymmetrically to positive and negative expected income growth. In this paper we investigate if this behavior is robust to a) assumptions on how the households form their expectations of future earnings and b)...

Aiming to explore how the survival of trade flows has evolved over time, we analyze a rich data set of detailed imports to individual EU15 countries from 140 non-EU exporters, covering the period 1962-2006. We find that short duration is a persistent characteristic of trade throughout the...

When analyzing panel data using regression models, it is often reasonable to allow for time-varying covariate effects. We propose a novel approach to modelling timevarying coefficients in panel data regressions, which is based on penalized regression techniques. To illustrate the usefulness of...

In endeavouring to explain the empirical puzzle that the sunk costs of exporting are important, but that, at the same time, trade flows do not, on average, survive for very long, this paper explores the concepts of core and peripheral markets. First, it illustrates that if the importance of sunk...

We combine a novel measure of export-related financial needs at the product level with a unique database of firm-product export data from five developing countries. Using the tools of survival analysis and controlling for firm and products fixed effects, we then examine the impact of financial...

In this paper we investigate the impact of a decrease in trade costs on firm decisions to export. The main contribution of this paper is to evaluate empirically the theoretical predictions of several models of multi-product exporters. The focus is on the firm export entry decision and the within...

This paper investigates trade effects of the euro focusing on the impact on bystanders. A common currency is expected to lower both variable and fixed trade costs, inducing increased trade flows between currency-union members on both intensive and extensive margins of trade. While this...

The recent literature on the duration of trade has predominantly analyzed the determinants of trade flow durations using Cox proportional hazards models. The purpose of this paper is to show why it is inappropriate to analyze the duration of trade with continuous-time models such as the Cox...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, against the background of an existing empirical literature on the duration of trade which has found that international trade is often of strikingly short duration, we aim to establish whether or not EU imports from the rest of the world also are...