Revisiting the causal effects of exporting on productivity: Does price heterogeneity matter?

Tewodros Wassie

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper examines the causal effect of exporting on firms' productivity controlling for price heterogeneity. In most empirical studies that establish the export-productivity relationships, output is measured in values rather than in quantities. This makes it difficult to distinguish between productivity and within-firm changes in price that may occur following exposure to international markets. Using a detail data on quantity and prices from Ethiopian manufacturing firms in the period 1996-2005, this paper distinguishes efficiency from revenue based productivity and examines what this means for the estimated relationship between exporting and productivity. The empirical strategy implemented in the paper allows for potential endogeneity for exporting and controls for self-selection into export. The main results show that exporters are more productive than non-exporters in terms of revenue based productivity and this is explained by both self-selection and learning effects. However, when correcting for price heterogeneity using quantity-based measures of productivity, exporters appear to be similar to non-exporters either before or after export entry. Overall, the results suggest that the observed relationship between exporting and productivity mainly occurs through price mechanism.

Keywords: Export; revenue productivity; physical productivity; price heterogeneity; fixed effect quantile regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 F14 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/80576/1/MPRA_paper_80576.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Revisiting the Causal Effects of Exporting on Productivity: Does Price Heterogeneity Matter? (2019)
Working Paper: Revisiting the causal effects of exporting on productivity: Does price heterogeneity matter? (2018)
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:pra:mprapa:80576

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().