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 disaggregat ed American import data and find evidence that countries and commodities ca n be ranked. Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United State s according to an ordering; goods are also exported in order. We estimate t hese orderings using a methodology, that takes account of the fact that mos t goods are not exported by most countries in our sample. Our orderings see m sensible, robust, and intuitive, and they are correlated with macroeconom ic phenomena such as productivity and growth rates.