Few firms import, even when formal trade barriers are low and despite substantial potential gains. Likely reasons are uncertainty and informational frictions, creating scope for local peers to affect new importers. We explore this hypothesis using data on French imports by...

Few firms import, even when formal trade barriers are low and despite substantial potential gains. Likely reasons are uncertainty and informational frictions, creating scope for local peers to affect new importers. We explore this hypothesis using data on French imports by...

In this paper we study how international trade in goods and services interact at the firm level. Using a rich dataset on Belgian firms during the period 1995-2005, we show that: i) firms are much more likely to source services and goods inputs from the same origin country rather than from...

How do exporters expand their product scope and geographical presence? We argue that new exporters are uncertain about their profitability in different countries and products, but learn it as they start to export. As a consequence, exporters add products and countries sequentially, in an...

We provide an analysis of the 2008-2009 trade collapse using microdata from a small open economy, Belgium. First, we find that changes in firm-country-product exports and imports occurred mostly at the intensive margin: the number of firms, the average number of destination and origin markets...

We discuss how standard computable equilibrium models of trade policy can be enriched with selection effects without missing other important channels of adjustment. This is achieved by estimating and simulating a partial equilibrium model that accounts for a number of real world effects of trade...