Dear colleagues, The Department of Economics cordially invites you to the Research Seminar in Economics on Wednesday, March 4th, with Gábor Békés (https://people.ceu.edu/gabor_bekes) presenting: "What Happens in Paris, Does Not Stay in Paris: Trade Fairs and Search and Matching Frictions". Abstract: Search and matching frictions prevent firms from forming international trade linkages. Firms commonly use trade fairs to overcome these frictions. However, despite often being subsidized by export promotion agencies, we lack evidence on how trade fairs facilitate link formation. We exploit a unique feature of Hungarian firms' participation in the 1900 Paris World Exhibition, where a trial exhibition revealed firms' ex-ante export potential category to develop a novel bounding strategy that compares treated firms to control groups from "above" and "below" in export potential. To implement our empirical strategy, we collected and digitized a novel dataset detailing firms' exhibition attendance and export status, linking entities across five different datasets. We find that participation increases export probability by 8.5-14\% and employment by 15.4-23\% over eight years. Effects are larger when firms face fewer domestic competitors and more potential international buyers. This highlights both matching benefits and congestion effects when search and matching frictions are reduced. To carry out this estimation, we build a novel historical panel dataset of Hungarian firms for the 1894 to 1906 period by digitizing and combining over 12,000 firm records from five historical datasets. * Date: Wednesday, March 4th * Time: 4.30 to 6 pm (CET) * Location: building D4, entrance A, ground floor, D4.0.144<https://campus.wu.ac.at/?q=D4.0.144> With best regards, Harald Oberhofer --- Univ.-Prof. Dr. Harald Oberhofer Department of Economics WU Vienna University of Economics and Business Phone: +43/1/31336-4984 Email: harald.oberhofer@wu.ac.at<mailto:harald.oberhofer@wu.ac.at> https://www.wu.ac.at/en/economics/people/oberhofer-h Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) Phone: +43/1/7982601-468 Email: harald.oberhofer@wifo.ac.at<mailto:harald.oberhofer@wifo.ac.at> http://www.wifo.ac.at/harald_oberhofer