Putting things in order: Trade dynamics and product cycles

We develop a procedure to rank-order objects using censored panel data sets. We illustrate this by ranking countries and commodities using disaggregated American import data and find evidence that countries and commodities can be ranked. Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United States according to an ordering; goods are also exported in order. We estimate these orderings using a methodology, that takes account of the fact that most goods are not exported by most countries in our sample. Our orderings seem sensible, robust, and intuitive, and they are correlated with macroeconomic phenomena such as productivity and growth rates.