Sourcing intermediate goods efficiently is essential for a country's production capacity. Countries located in a neighborhood providing a wide range of intermediate goods cheaply available can take advantage of scale economies to reduce their production costs and improve their global...

This paper quantifies the value of importer-exporter relationships. We show that almost 80 percent of U.S. imports take place in pre-existing relationships, with sizable heterogeneity across countries, and show that traded quantities and survival increase as relationships age. We develop a...