Understanding Cross-Country Differences in Exporter Premia: Comparable Evidence for 14 Countries

We use comparable micro level panel data for 14 countries and a set of identically specified empirical models to investigate the relationship between exports and productivity. Our overall results are in line with the big picture that is by now familiar from the literature: exporters are more productive than non-exporters when observed and unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for, and these exporter productivity premia tend to increase with the share of exports in total sales; there is evidence in favour of self-selection of more productive firms into export markets, but nearly no evidence in favour of the learning-by-exporting hypothesis. We document that the exporter premia differ considerably across countries in identically specified empirical models. In a meta-analysis of our results we find, consistent with theoretical predictions, that productivity premia are larger in countries with lower export participation rates, with more restrictive trade policies, lower per capita GDP, less effective government and worse regulatory quality, and in countries exporting to relatively more distant markets. JEL no.  F14, D21     

Fixed Export Costs and Export Behavior

This article provides a direct assessment of how fixed export costs (FECs) and productivity jointly determine firm‐level export behavior. Using Chilean data, we construct indices of FECs for each industry‐region‐year triplet and match them to domestic firms. Our empirical results show that firms facing higher estimated FECs are less likely to export, while those with higher productivity export more. These outcomes are the foundation of the widely‐used sorting mechanism in trade models with firm heterogeneity. We also find that the substitution between FECs and productivity in determining export decisions is weaker for firms with higher productivity. Finally, among firms that export, both larger FECs and greater within‐triplet productivity dispersion are associated with a greater export volume of the average exporter.     

Higher productivity in importing German manufacturing firms: self-selection, learning from importing, or both?

This paper 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 on 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.     

Sorting It Out: Technical Barriers to Trade and Industry Productivity

Trade economists traditionally study the effect of lower variable trade costs. While increasingly important politically, technical barriers to trade (TBTs) have received less attention. Viewing TBTs as fixed regulatory costs related to the entry into export markets, we use a model with heterogeneous firms, trade in differentiated goods, and variable external economies of scale to sort out the rich interactions between TBT reform, input diversity, firm-level productivity, and aggregate productivity. We calibrate the model for 14 industries in order to clarify the theoretical ambiguities. Overall, our results tend to suggest beneficial effects of TBT reform but also reveal interesting sectoral variation.     

Impact of Regulatory Burdens on International Trade

In this paper, we develop the additional compliance requirement indicator (ACRI) to quantify the extra regulatory requirements that an exporter may face when serving the foreign country's market. The higher the value of ACRI, the greater the difference between the sets of technical measures in the destination and origin countries. Employing the ACRI, we estimate the impact on trade of regulatory burdens via product-level bilateral gravity equations. We find a significant negative impact of regulatory burdens on bilateral trade for a full sample, but the estimated trade effects vary across sectors and depend on the development levels of the trading countries.     

Trade integration and within-plant productivity evolution in Chile

We analyze the impact of trade integration on plant TFP using Chilean plant-level data (1982–1999) and 3-digit bilateral trade flows. Our contribution is to disentangle the impact of export and import barriers, estimated as border effects within a multilateral context. A fall in export barriers is positively correlated with plant productivity in traded sectors. The reduction of import barriers, however, can only be associated to productivity improvements in export-oriented sectors. In import-competing sectors a robust positive correlation shows up between plant productivity and protection. We then test several channels linking trade integration and firm productivity.     

Powerless: gains from trade when firm productivity is not Pareto distributed

Most trade models featuring heterogeneous firms assume a Pareto productivity distribution, on the basis that it provides a reasonable representation of the data and because of its analytical tractability. However, recent work shows that the characteristics of the productivity distribution crucially affect the estimated gains from trade. This paper thoroughly compares the gains from trade obtained under three different productivity distributions (Pareto, lognormal, and Weibull) and investigates their policy implications. We find that both the magnitude of the welfare gains and the relative importance of the fixed versus variable trade costs change significantly. Hence, relying blindly on a single distribution is dangerous when performing trade policy analysis.     

外资企业选址与企业生产率

本文利用Grossman-Helpman-Szeidl（2006）模型研究了外资企业在发展中国家内部的选址决策,模型表明：效率高的企业偏向选址于固定成本高可变成本低的地方,效率低的企业偏向选址于固定成本低可变成本高的地方。同时各个地区的效率空间会被运输成本所压缩。由于中国东部、中西部与东南亚国家之间劳动力工资以及固定投资成本的结构差异,高效率的企业会选址于印尼、菲律宾、越南三国,效率处于中间的企业会选址于中国中西部以及中国东部,效率最低的企业会选址于马来西亚、泰国两国。随后本文用2004-2013年Bvd亚太企业母公司层面面板数据验证了企业因效率不同而导致的选址差异。最后本文分析了双边自由贸易区对企业选址的效率空间的影响,研究表明双边自由贸易区对中国中西部的影响大于对中国东部的影响。     

China's domestic trade during the Treaty-Port Era

We employ a new, commodity-level dataset on the flow of goods between fifteen major treaty ports to estimate a general-equilibrium trade model for China in the late Qing era. The distribution of welfare effects depends critically on each port's productivity, China's economic geography as it influences trade costs, as well as the degree of regional diversity in production, which increases the potential gains from trade. We utilize this framework to quantify the size and distribution of welfare effects resulting from new technology and lower trade costs that emerged during the Treaty-Port Era. Our results suggest that the new trade with foreign countries led to significant changes in domestic trade relationships. There was a limit to how much could be gained through increased domestic trade, however, because differences in productivity across regions were relatively low.     

Behind the heterogeneous trade effects of standards: Multi-sector evidence from China

Standards can influence trades via multiple channels, such as signaling effects, common language effects, and compliance costs. We argue that the impacting channels of standards differ across sectors, which originates from diverse sector features and results in heterogeneous trade effects of standards. In this paper, we focus on the trade effects of standards in developing countries as exporters. Gravity models are applied on the panel data of China’s bilateral trades in 33 sectors from 2002 to 2016. We examine the moderating role of sector features, including the intensity of capital, labor, and technology, on the trade effects of standards. We find that trade-promoting effects of standards are stronger in high-capital sectors and weaker in high-labor sectors. In high-tech sectors, the trade-promoting effects are stronger for internationally harmonized standards while weaker for national standards. Our findings provide managerial implications on standardization policies for China and other developing countries. For instance, international harmonization of standards should be highlighted in high-tech sectors.     

On the Impact of Transportation Costs on Trade in a Multilateral World

This article proposes to account for the differences in the importance of transport costs, depending on characteristics of trading partners. In a multiregion model of trade in differentiated goods we expect a smaller impact of transport costs on a country's exports as a share of importer gross domestic product (GDP) the more (less) relatively capital-abundant the exporter (importer) is and the lower (higher) production costs are as captured by GDP at given factor endowments and diversity, all else equal. Empirically, this requires four interaction terms in addition to the direct impact of transport costs when estimating log-linear gravity models: one with the exporter GDP per capita or capital-labor ratio, a second one with the importer GDP per capita or capital-labor ratio, and a third and fourth with exporter and importer GDP, respectively. The hypotheses are strongly supported by the evidence from a large panel of bilateral trade between 1970 and 2000.     

Financial dependence and exports: Entrants or incumbents?

Using firm-level customs data from 51 countries at different levels of development, we explore differential impacts of access to finance on incumbent and new exporters. Consistent with the literature, firms in sectors more dependent on external finance have higher exports based in financially more developed countries. This effect, however, occurs entirely through entrants, with no effect found for incumbents. The trade response of entrants works primarily through the extensive margin (number of exporters) rather than the intensive margin (average size). We further find access to external finance affects exporter entry rates while it does not affect exporter exit rates.     

Can the Japanese agri-food producers survive under freer trade? A general equilibrium analysis with farm heterogeneity and product differentiation

The roles of firm heterogeneity and product differentiation in the manufacturing industries have attracted research attention on the “new new trade theory.” The agricultural sectors also produce new goods using product differentiation through breeding, branding, and other activities. In reaction to globalization, the Japanese Government has sought to revitalize its agri-food sectors by promoting exports of differentiated products. This computable general equilibrium study examines the relevance of this policy, focusing on five agri-food sectors other than grains. We simulate Japan’s three trade deals and a policy intervention that cuts fixed export costs to promote exports. We show that only a few agri-food sectors can increase exports and maintain domestic output under freer trade, and that export promotion would markedly increase entrants into export markets and increase exports of the vegetables and fruit, and processed food product sectors. In these trade deals, tariff and nontariff barriers have different impacts on trade, output, and farm/firm entry.     

EU enlargement and its impacts on East Asia

Ten countries—most completing their transition from socialist-based economies to market economies—are slated to join the European Union (EU) in 2004 and four additional countries are expected to become members at some future dates. Despite the relatively small economic size of the accession countries, this type of deep integration can have non-negligible effects on countries outside of the preferential zone as the reduction in barriers across partners leads to a re-orientation of trade. In this paper, we evaluate the extent of trade adjustments and the economic impacts it will have on the East Asian economies using a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. The overall macroeconomic effects on East Asia are small. There is some trade diversion, but there may be an opportunity to increase market penetration in some sectors of the expanding EU for which East Asia has a marked comparative advantage. The paper also assesses the relative importance of linking trade openness to productivity and lowering trade costs between the accession countries and the EU-15.     

Understanding the role of trade agreements in Indonesia’s FDI

In this paper, we develop the hypothesis that trade agreements influence foreign direct investment (FDI). We extend the conventional model of FDI determinants to accommodate the role of trade agreements. Fitting Indonesian data to this model, we discover strong evidence that, while both bilateral and multilateral trade agreements positively influence Indonesia’s FDI, multilateral agreements have a larger effect. We further distinguish FDI by sector and find sector-specific trade agreements play an active role: these agreements positively influence FDI in the primary and service sectors, but not in the manufacturing sector. We also find that trade agreements positively influence FDI through the export and total factor productivity channels, and less so through the economic growth channel.     

An investigation into the quantitative properties of the specific factors model of international trade

This paper presents a specification of a fundamental and popular model in the theory of international trade, the specific factors model. Data from 24 sectors of the Japanese economy are used. Simulated comparative static elasticities extend basic trade theory by uncovering and postulating the following quantitative properties:

1. (i) near factor price equalization with free trade;

2. (ii) high levels of specialization and trade across trading partners; and

3. (iii) concentrated benefits and diffused costs of protection.

Free trade can thus be expected to nearly equalize prices of similar inputs across countries and lead to high levels of specialization and trade.     

Assessing Productivity Gains from International Trade in a Small Open Economy

Empirical evidence suggests that exporter firms tend to charge higher markups than non-exporters due to trade barriers. The exporters’ markup premium, however, may disappear in a special case, namely when the home country is small relative to its trade partners and trade barriers are low. This can be because competition is more intense in the large export destination than in the small home country, so that firms are able to set higher markups for locally sold products but not for exports. This paper provides empirical evidence on the validity of this special case by estimating markups for firms in Luxembourg who generally export to larger countries. The estimated negative markup premium for exporters has important implications for the productivity measurement. In a sufficiently small open economy, exporters’ productivity may be biased downward, when the firm-level markup variation is not controlled for in the productivity estimation. The bias in the productivity estimates further leads to the inaccurate conclusion that openness to international trade lowers allocative efficiency.     

How preferences shape the welfare and employment effects of trade

Review of World Economics - We set up a trade model with two countries, two sectors, and one production factor, which features a home-market effect due to the existence of trade costs. We consider...     

Estimating the Impact of Time-Invariant Variables on FDI with Fixed Effects

This paper applies the panel fixed effects with vector decomposition estimator to three FDI data sets to estimate the impact of time-invariant variables on FDI while including fixed effects. We find that the omission of fixed effects significantly biases the results, leading to contradictory predictions regarding the effect of trade costs and culture across data sets. After eliminating these biases, the differences across data sets largely disappear and many time-invariant variables consistently indicate the importance of vertical FDI. This suggests that some controversies in the literature may be driven by the extent to which unaccounted fixed effects biases vary across different data sets. JEL no.  F14, F23     

The poverty trap: The dual externality model and its policy implications

This paper analyzes poverty traps in a monopolistic competition general equilibrium model with aggregate demand externality. In our model, the central hypothesis is represented by the introduction of externalities in fixed costs that firms have to incur in order to industrialize as a spillover across sectors. By this we mean that the fixed cost incurred by a firm in order to start production can reduce the fixed cost that firms in other sectors of the economy must incur. With such an assumption, we can show the possibility for an economy to be locked in at different stages of development. We then proceed to discuss the policy implications and the possible role for government intervention. To this end we provide a potential framework of reference that, if properly developed, may be useful in policy design.