TY  - JOUR
AU  - Besedes,Tibor
AU  - Prusa,Thomas J.
TI  - On the Duration of Trade
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9936
PY  - 2003
Y2  - September 2003
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9936
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9936.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Tibor Besedes
School of Economics
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0615
E-Mail: besedes@gatech.edu

Thomas J. Prusa
Department of Economics
New Jersey Hall
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1248
Tel: 908.443.1565
E-Mail: prusa@econ.rutgers.edu
AB  - This paper employs survival analysis to study the duration of US imports. We find that the median duration of exporting a product to the US is very short, on the order to two to four years. Our results also indicate that there is negative duration dependence meaning that if a country is able to survive in the exporting market for the first few years it will face a very small probability of failure and will export the product for a long period of time. This result holds across countries and industries. We find that our results are not only robust to aggregation but are strengthened by aggregation. That is, as we aggregate from product level trade data to SITC industry level trade data the estimated survival increases. We rank countries by their survival experience and show that our rankings are strongly correlated with the rankings in Feenstra and Rose (2002), implying that product cycle followers also experience particularly short duration.
ER  -