Robust estimates of exporter productivity premia in German business services enterprises

Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksChapterpeer-review

Authors

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMicroeconometric Studies Of Firms Imports And Exports : Advanced Methods Of Analysis And Evidence From German Enterprises
EditorsJoachim Wagner
Number of pages25
PublisherWorld Scientific Publishing Co.
Publication date25.02.2021
Pages239-263
ISBN (Print)9781786349682
ISBN (Electronic)9781786349705
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 25.02.2021

    Research areas

  • Exporter productivity premium, Panel data, Robust estimation, Services firms
  • Economics