TY - JOUR

T1 - Robust estimates of exporter productivity premia in German business services enterprises

AU - Vogel, Alexander

AU - Wagner, Joachim

PY - 2011

Y1 - 2011

N2 - A large and growing number of micro-econometric studies show that exporting firms are more productive than firms that sell their products on the home market only. This so-called exporter productivity premium qualifies as a stylized fact. Only recently researchers started to look at the role of extreme observations, or outliers, in shaping these findings. These studies use micro-econometric methods that are robust against outliers to show that very small shares of firms with extreme values drive the result. The large exporter productivity premium found for samples of firms including outliers are dramatically smaller in samples without these extreme observations. Evidence on this, however, is limited so far to firms from manufacturing industries. This note adds comparable evidence for firms from the business services industries. We find that the estimated exporter productivity premium is statistically significant and relevant from an economic point of view when a standard fixed effects estimator is used to control for unobserved firm characteristics, but that it drops to zero when a robust estimator is applied.F14

AB - A large and growing number of micro-econometric studies show that exporting firms are more productive than firms that sell their products on the home market only. This so-called exporter productivity premium qualifies as a stylized fact. Only recently researchers started to look at the role of extreme observations, or outliers, in shaping these findings. These studies use micro-econometric methods that are robust against outliers to show that very small shares of firms with extreme values drive the result. The large exporter productivity premium found for samples of firms including outliers are dramatically smaller in samples without these extreme observations. Evidence on this, however, is limited so far to firms from manufacturing industries. This note adds comparable evidence for firms from the business services industries. We find that the estimated exporter productivity premium is statistically significant and relevant from an economic point of view when a standard fixed effects estimator is used to control for unobserved firm characteristics, but that it drops to zero when a robust estimator is applied.F14

KW - Economics, empirical/statistics

KW - Exporter productivity premium

KW - services firms

KW - robust estimation

KW - panel data

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 13

SP - 7

EP - 26

JO - Economic and Business Review

JF - Economic and Business Review

IS - 1-2

ER -