Economic opinion is in the process of re-interpreting low levels of uptake of non-reciprocal pre-ferential trade agreements (PTAs) partly in terms of administrative barriers to preference utiliza-tion. Primary amongst these barriers are Rules of Origin. This paper reviews the literature on Rules...

This study uses Comtrade trade data covering 1990-2017, 14 textile subsectors, and 53 African countries with their main trade partners to evaluate Chinese trade impacts on African textile exports over three subperiods at the sector level. It finds that, although textile imports from China had a...

In a duopoly market, aspiration levels express how much sellers want to earn given their expectations about the other's behavior. We augment the sellers' decision task by eliciting their profit aspiration. In a first experimental phase, whenever satisficing is not possible, sales choices, point...

From a theoretical point of view, greater trade openness affects firm-level volatility by changing the exposure and the reaction of firms to macroeconomic shocks. The net effect is ambiguous, though. This paper provides firm-level evidence on the link between openness and volatility. Using two...

The relationship between individual firms? export behaviour and firm performance has been studied extensively in the economic literature. However, most studies from the field of economics only distinguish between exporting and non-exporting companies, using the firms? export status as a binary...

This paper explores the contribution of design activities on product market performance of Belgian companies. While there is mounting evidence that design can be seen as a strategic tool to successfully spur sales of new product developments at the firm level, the topic of design innovation has...