Quality of Firms’ Exports and Distance to Destination Countries: First Evidence from Germany

This paper uses a tailor-made new data set of 7,112,614 observations for export quality (measured by the unit value of exports) at the firm-product-destination level for German and the reporting year 2011. Data are from 119,280 firms that exported 4986 products (recorded at the HS6-level) in 1,632,731 firm-product combinations to 174 countries. The paper investigates for the first time the link between the quality of firms’ exports and the distance to destination countries for Germany. It is shown that, in line with theory, the quality of exported goods and distance to destination countries are statistically positively correlated.