This paper analyses the choices made by individual firms to enter the export market. It uses data on a sample of Irish firms over seventeen years to test whether sunk costs influence the decision to export. A probit specification tests the probability of exporting in the current period given...

Two recent trends in international economics have been an increased focus on the geography of trade (e.g. what factors determine where a country exports to) and the emergence of empirical work examining firm-level data on exporting activity. However, data limitations have prevented there being...

One of the most famous and robust findings in international economics is that distance has a strong negative effect on trade. Bernard, Jensen, Redding, and Schott (2007) discuss how this can be decomposed into an effect due to the number of products and an effect due to average exports per...

While growth in output and employment remains relatively strong in the Irish economy, there has been considerable focus recently on some high-profile job losses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. This paper places these developments within a broader context and shows that aggregate...

This paper presents an extension of the analysis of the geographic dimension of trade, by examining the trading patterns of individual firms. Aggregate data does not tell us if a sector is geographically diversified because there are many exporting firms, each of which specialises in a separate...

One of the most robust empirical results in international economics is the existence of a negative relationship between trade flows and distance. More recent research on exporting activity at the firm level has established an apparently equally robust result— few firms export, and exporting...

Since the mid-1990s the average growth rates of real GDP and labour productivity in the European Union have fallen behind those in the United States. This development has led to questions about the potential contribution of the differences in measurement methodologies to GDP and productivity...