Learning-by-Exporting? Firm-Level Evidence for UK Manufacturing and Services Sectors

Richard Ian Harris and Qian Cher Li ()

Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Glasgow

Abstract: This study empirically assesses the microeconomic exporting-productivity nexus for both the UK manufacturing and services sectors during 1996-2004, based on a weighted FAME dataset. Our results show that firms that are older, that possess intangible assets or that have higher (labour) productivity in the year prior to exporting, are significantly more likely to sell overseas. In testing the post-entry ‘learning-by-exporting’ effect, we employ three approaches to controlling for endogeneity and sample selection, viz. instrumental variables, control function and matching, and find that this effect is present in many industries but not universal, and also varies amongst different types of exporting firms. Our overall estimate for the UK economy suggests a substantial post-entry productivity effect for firms new to exporting; a negative effect for firms exiting overseas markets; and large productivity gains while exporting for those that both enter and exit.

Keywords: exports; control function; GMM; matching; TFP; sample selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 F14 L25 R38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff and nep-tid
Date: 2007-08
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_36279_en.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gla:glaewp:2007_22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Glasgow
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Jeanette Findlay ().