Using macro-level trade data, we investigate how different types of sunk costs influence decisions of exporters. We find that exporters’ decisions reflect sensibly their desire to minimize the relationship-specific sunk costs. Specifically, exporters of differentiated products are more likely...

In this paper, we reexamine closely the empirical evidence for the home-market effect (HME) found by Hanson and Xiang (American Economic Review, 2004). We first show that evidence for the HME from their difference-in-difference gravity equation is sensitive to the way the independent variable of...

Using product-level trade data, we empirically investigate the export patterns of more than 150 countries in their exports to the U.S., Brazil, India and Japan. We document strong evidence that exporters specialize according to their relative factor endowments, technology, and economic size....

In an influential paper, Schott (2004) makes two empirical observations about U.S. imports. (1) The United States is increasingly sourcing the same product (however narrowly defined) from both developed and developing countries. That is, ‘across-product specialization’ has been decreasing....

This paper evaluates the performance of alternative estimators of the gravity equation when zero trade flows result from economically-based data-generating processes with heteroscedastic residuals and potentially-omitted variables. In a standard Monte Carlo analysis, the paper finds that this...