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...

Knowledge is key to the competitiveness and success of an organization and in particular of a firm. Firms and their managers acquire knowledge via a variety of different channels which are often difficult to track down and quantify. By matching employer–employee data with trade data at the...

We use Belgian manufacturing firm-level data over the period 1996–2007 to analyze the impact of imports from different origins on firm employment growth, exit, and skill upgrading. For this purpose, we use both industry-level and firm-level imports by country of origin and further distinguish...

The standard two-country model of international trade with monopolistic competition predicts a more-than-proportional relationship between a country's share of world production of a good and its share of world demand for that same good, a result known as the 'home market effect'. We first show...

We investigate the role of competitive transport markets in shaping the location of economic activity and the pattern of trade. In our model, carriers supply transport services for shipping manufactured goods, and freight rates are set to clear transport markets. Each carrier must commit to the...

We present a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition featuring pro-competitive effects and a competitive limit, and investigate the impact of trade on welfare and efficiency. Contrary to the constant elasticity case, in which all gains from trade are due to product diversity, our...