TY - UNPB

T1 - The Exporter Productivity Premium along the Productivity Distribution

T2 - First Evidence from Quantile Regression Approach for Fixed Effects Panel Data Models

AU - Powell, David

AU - Wagner, Joachim

N1 - Literaturverz. S. 15 - 18

PY - 2010

Y1 - 2010

N2 - An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents that exporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. This positive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies after controlling for observed and unobserved firm characteristics in regression models including firm fixed effects. These studies test for a difference in productivity between exporters and non-exporters at the conditional mean of the productivity distribution. However, if firms are heterogeneous, it is possible that the size of the premium varies over the productivity distribution. In this paper we apply a newly developed estimator for fixed-effects quantile regression models to estimate the exporter productivity premium at quantiles of the productivity distribution for manufacturing enterprises in Germany, one of the leading actors in the world market for goods. We show that the premium decreases over the quantiles - a dimension of firm heterogeneity that cannot be detected through mean regression.

AB - An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents that exporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. This positive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies after controlling for observed and unobserved firm characteristics in regression models including firm fixed effects. These studies test for a difference in productivity between exporters and non-exporters at the conditional mean of the productivity distribution. However, if firms are heterogeneous, it is possible that the size of the premium varies over the productivity distribution. In this paper we apply a newly developed estimator for fixed-effects quantile regression models to estimate the exporter productivity premium at quantiles of the productivity distribution for manufacturing enterprises in Germany, one of the leading actors in the world market for goods. We show that the premium decreases over the quantiles - a dimension of firm heterogeneity that cannot be detected through mean regression.

KW - Economics

KW - exporter productivity premium

KW - quantile regression

KW - fixed effects

M3 - Working papers

T3 - Working paper series in economics

BT - The Exporter Productivity Premium along the Productivity Distribution

PB - Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre der Universität Lüneburg

CY - Lüneburg

ER -