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...

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...

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...

Market exchange is subject to an endogenously-determined level of predation which impedes specialization and gains from trade. Utility-maximizing agents opt between careers in specialized production and careers in predation. Three types of equilibria may emerge, autarky (with no predation and no...

Chinese investment abroad has grown significantly in connection with the Belt and Road Initiative. This article tries to answer two questions: first, what considerations gave birth to the BRI? And second, what are the project's economic effects in terms of capital flows and international trade?...