EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Higher Productivity in Importing German Manufacturing Firms: Self-selection, Learning from Importing or Both?

Alexander Vogel and Joachim Wagner ()

Chapter 4 in Microeconometrics of International Trade, 2016, pp 139-174 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: This chapter uses a newly available comprehensive panel data set for manufacturing enterprises from 2001 to 2005 to document the first empirical results on the relationship between imports and productivity for Germany, a leading actor in the world market for goods. Furthermore, for the first time, the direction of causality in this relationship is investigated systematically by testing for self-selection of more productive firms into importing, and for productivity-enhancing effects of imports (“learning-by-importing”). We find a positive link between importing and productivity. From an empirical model with fixed enterprise effects that controls for firm size, industry and unobservable firm heterogeneity, we see that the premia for trading internationally are about the same in West and East Germany. Compared to firms that do not trade at all, two-way traders do have the highest premia, followed by firms that only export, while firms that only import have the smallest estimated premia. We find evidence for a positive impact of productivity on importing, pointing to self-selection of more productive enterprises into imports, but no clear evidence for the effect of importing on productivity due to learning-by-importing.

Keywords: Microeconometrics; International Trade; Exports; Imports; Firm Performance; Productivity; Profits; Wages; Firm Survival (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789813109698_0004 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789813109698_0004 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
Journal Article: Higher productivity in importing German manufacturing firms: self-selection, learning from importing, or both? (2010) Downloads
Working Paper: Higher Productivity in Importing German Manufacturing Firms: Self-Selection, Learning from Importing, or Both? (2008) Downloads
Working Paper: Higher Productivity in Importing German Manufacturing Firms: Self-selection, Learning from Importing, or Both? (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:wsi:wschap:9789813109698_0004

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:wsi:wschap:9789813109698_0004