EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Firms in International Trade: Importers’ and Exporters’ Heterogeneity in Italian Manufacturing Industry

Davide Castellani, Francesco Serti and Chiara Tomasi (chiara.tomasi@unitn.it)

The World Economy, 2010, vol. 33, issue 3, 424-457

Abstract: Combining data on structural characteristics and economic performance for a large sample of Italian firms with data on exporting and importing activity, we uncover evidence supporting recent theories on firm heterogeneity and international trade, together with some new facts. In particular, we find that importing is associated with substantial firm heterogeneity. First, we document that trade is more concentrated than employment and sales, and show that importing is even more concentrated than exporting both within sectors and along the sector‐ and country‐extensive margins. Second, while supporting the fact that firms involved in both are the best performers, we also find that firms involved only in importing activities perform better than those involved only in exporting. Our evidence suggests there is a strong self‐selection effect in the case of importers and the performance premia of internationalised firms correlate relatively more with the degree of geographical and sectoral diversification of imports.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (151)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9701.2010.01262.x

Related works:
Working Paper: Firms in International Trade: Importers and Exporters Heterogeneity in the Italian Manufacturing Industry (2008) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:worlde:v:33:y:2010:i:3:p:424-457

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0378-5920

Access Statistics for this article

The World Economy is currently edited by David Greenaway

More articles in The World Economy from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery (contentdelivery@wiley.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:bla:worlde:v:33:y:2010:i:3:p:424-457