Survive and Thrive: The Duration of Cultural Goods Exports from China

This paper employs survival analysis to examine the duration of cultural goods exports from China. We use disaggregated product-level data from 1995 to 2020 to explore the export dynamics of Chinese cultural goods and investigate the determinants. We find that most of the export relationships are short-lived, with a median duration of one year. However, if Chinese cultural goods can survive in the foreign market during the early stage, they will face a lower probability of failure and tend to survive for a longer period. In addition, we show that cultural distance is more of an obstacle to the exports of cultural goods under the framework of the gravity model. These findings survive a variety of robustness checks and have important policy implications.