This chapter investigates whether the best firms become exporters or whether a firm becomes better as a result of being an exporter. The evidence reviewed suggests that productivity growth in exporting firms generally occurs before rather than after the firm starts to export. It concludes that policy intervention to encourage exports is often useful, in particular where firms don’t recognise th...

Firm innovation effort, productivity, and export propensity are found to be positively correlated with one another. Two alternative explanations have been offered for this — innovation increases productivity and more productive firms self-select into exporting or, alternatively, exporting increases learning and innovation, which in turn affects productivity. We use differences in timing implied...

To the best of our knowledge, the international marketing literature has been examining performance exclusively as a dependent variable. In this paper we argue that performance should be investigated as an independent variable. Using survey data of over 400 managers responsible for the main export ventures of Portuguese SMEs (Small and Medium Exporters), this paper shows that past performance p...

It is widely believed that globalization affects the extent of employment and wage responses to economic shocks. To provide evidence for this, we analyze the effect of firms’ exporting behavior on the elasticity of labor demand. Using rich, German administrative linked employer-employee panel data from 1996 to 2008, we explicitly control for self-selection into exporting and endogeneity concern...

In this paper we present a simple source code configuration tool. ExLibris operates on libraries and can be used to extract from local libraries all code relevant to a particular project. Our approach is not designed to address problems arising in code production lines, but rather, to support the needs of individual or small teams of researchers who wish to communicate their Prolog programs. In...