Firms’ International Status and Heterogeneity in Performance: Evidence From Italy

Gaetano Alfredo Minerva, Lorenzo Casaburi and Valeria Gattai
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Lorenzo Casaburi: Università di Bologna

No 2008.3, Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei

Abstract: This paper revisits the empirical evidence about the link between firms’ performance and their international status, based on a large sample of Italian enterprises. To this purpose, we merged two waves of the Capitalia survey (1998-2000, and 2001-2003) retrieving firm level data for roughly 7,000 units. Three results stand out from our empirical exercise. First, firms that engage in the foreign production of final goods, in addition to export activities, are more productive than firms that only export abroad. Second, firms that engage in final goods off-shoring are more productive than firms that engage in inputs off-shoring. Third, in terms of the productivity dynamics over the period 1998-2003, exporters’ performance in Italy was not any better than the non-exporters’ one. Our results support the view that the better performance (in static terms) of globally engaged firms is chiefly due to the selection caused by the fixed costs associated to international operations.

Keywords: Export; Heterogeneous Firms; Italy; Off-shoring; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F20 L10 L20 L60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-eff and nep-int
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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Working Paper: Firms’ International Status and Heterogeneity in Performance: Evidence From Italy (2008)
Journal Article: Firms' International Status and Heterogeneity in Performance: Evidence from Italy (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fem:femwpa:2008.3

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