TY - UNPB

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

AU - Wagner, Joachim

AU - Vogel, Alexander

PY - 2011/1

Y1 - 2011/1

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 estimatoris applied.

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 estimatoris applied.

KW - Economics, empirical/statistics

KW - Exporter productivity premium

KW - services firms

KW - robust estimation

KW - panel data

M3 - Working papers

T3 - Working paper series in economics

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

PB - Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre der Universität Lüneburg

ER -