The Exporter Productivity Premium Along the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from Quantile Regression with Nonadditive Firm Fixed Effects

David Powell and Joachim Wagner ()

Chapter 9 in Microeconometric Studies of Firms' Imports and Exports:Advanced Methods of Analysis and Evidence from German Enterprises, 2021, pp 121-149 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: A vast literature on the international activities of heterogeneous firms finds the existence of a positive exporter productivity premium. On average, exporting firms are more productive than firms that sell on the national market only. The Melitz [2003] model, however, has implications for not only mean differences but also differences in the distribution of productivity. Furthermore, exporting firms may be different from non-exporting firms for reasons that are not included in the Melitz model. We believe that conditioning on firm fixed effects and studying the distribution of productivity are both necessary for empirical tests of the Melitz model. This paper is the first to introduce such a method by employing a new quantile estimation technique for panel data introduced in Powell [2013]. We find that the premium is positive at all productivity levels, but highest at the lowest quantiles. These results support theoretical models which suggest that there is a division in productivity between exporters and non-exporters.

Keywords: International Trade; Exports; Imports; Microeconometrics; Firm Level Data; Panel Data; Transaction Data; Cross-Country Studies; Germany; Productivity; Trade in Services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F02 F1 F13 F23 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9781786349699_0009 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9781786349699_0009 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
Journal Article: The exporter productivity premium along the productivity distribution: evidence from quantile regression with nonadditive firm fixed effects (2014)
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:wsi:wschap:9781786349699_0009

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().