This paper investigates whether the arrival of managers with export experience, i.e. experience acquired through participation in the export activity of previous employers, is related to firms’ international trade status and to what extent this relationship is of a causal nature. We construct...

We investigate the relationship between exporting, importing, and wage premia using a rich matched employer-employee data set. We improve on the previous literature (i) by using a new methodology to quantify the contribution of an extensive set of worker- and rm-level observable and ...

International economics has overwhelmingly relied on Samuelson's (1954) assumption that trade costs are proportional to value. We develop a quantitative analytical framework that features both additive and multiplicative (iceberg) trade costs, building on a model of international trade with...

The analysis of the effects of firm-level international trade on wages has so far focused on the role of exports, which are also typically treated as a composite good. However, we show in this paper that firm-level imports can actually be a wage determinant as important as exports. Furthermore,...

In this paper we propose a framework for studying export dynamics and market specific flows in a multicountry model of trade with heterogenous firms.<br>Countries are asymmetric in terms of their size, the size distribution of potential entrants, properties of firms idiosyncratic shocks, and trade...

Expansion into foreign markets is a major decision for a firm and it involves choices about which countries to approach and which products to export. We use a new database that covers the universe of export transactions for firms located in Portugal for the period 1996-2005 in order to examine...

This paper introduces persistent productivity shocks in a continuous-time mononopolistic competition model of trade with hetererogenous firms similar to Melitz (2003). In our model, the presence of sunk costs and uncertainty have three main consequences: first, firms export decisions become...