Trade Complexity and Productivity

Carlo Altomonte () and Gábor Békés

No 12, CeFiG Working Papers from Center for Firms in the Global Economy

Abstract: We exploit a panel dataset of Hungarian fi rms merged with country and product-level trade data for the period 1992-2003 to investigate the relation between firms’ trading activities (importing, exporting or both) and productivity. From our transaction data a number of proxies are derived, measuring at the firm level some characteristics of the traded bundles associated to various technological and relationship-speci c dimensions of the trade activity, which we generally refer to as ‘trade complexity’. We find that our indicators of complexity are jointly correlated to the ex-ante productivity of trading fi rms, accounting for an additional third of the overall productivity premium. However, the elasticity of productivity to a change in the trade complexity indicators varies with di fferent indicators of complexity and with the trade status of the fi rm. Policy conclusions are drawn from these findings.

Date: 2010-10-25, Revised 2010-10-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-int
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

Downloads: (external link)
http://resources.cefig.eu/papers/trade_complexity_and_productivity.pdf Trade Complexity and Productivity [pdf] (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to resources.cefig.eu:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

Related works:
Working Paper: Trade Complexity and Productivity (2009)
Working Paper: Trade Complexity and Productivity (2009)
Working Paper: Trade Complexity and Productivity (2009)
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:cfg:cfigwp:12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CeFiG Working Papers from Center for Firms in the Global Economy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Miklós Koren ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).