In this paper, we explore the relationship between innovation activity, productivity, and exports using a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms for 1990-1998. Our results – based on nonparametric tests – suggest that firm innovation status is critical in explaining the positive export-productivity association documented in prior research. For the sample of small innovating firms, we find no sign...

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...

Dispersion in labor and factor productivity across firms is large and persistent, large flows of workers move across firms, and worker reallocation is an important source of productivity growth. The purpose of the paper is to provide a formal explanation for these observations that clarifies the role of worker reallocation as a source of productivity growth. Specifically, we study a modified ve...

We examine productivity growth of for-hire general freight trucking firms from 1999 to 2003. We find that trucking firms, which are often considered to be competitive, are not necessarily technically efficient. Moreover, firms’ productivity growth over the five-year period was stagnant despite embracement of new technologies by the industry. We conclude that positive technical change was largel...

Empirical studies document that resource reallocation across production units plays an important role in accounting for aggregate productivity growth in the U.S. manufacturing. Distortions in financial market could hinder the reallocation process and hence may adversely affect aggregate productivity growth. This paper studies the quantitative impact of costly external finance on aggregate produ...

This paper examines whether and how the entry of foreign multinational firms affects productivity growth of domestically owned firms, using Japanese firm-level data for the period 2000-2007. Although there are a considerable number of studies conducting productivity analyses on foreign multinationals and domestic firms for the manufacturing sector, there are few such studies for the service sec...

With a newly constructed dataset on foreign firms in Japan for the period 1995-2008 from firm-level surveys, this paper estimates the impact of foreign firms on industrial productivity at the regional level. A Bayesian-model averaging approach is taken to account for model uncertainty resulting from various linkages between foreign firms and domestic industries. The results show that the foreig...

A Melitz-style model of monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms is integrated into a simple NEG model to show that the standard assumption of identical firms is neither necessary nor innocuous. We show that re-locating to the big region is most attractive for the most productivity firms; this implies interesting results for empirical work and policy analysis. A ‘selection effect’ mean...

This paper contributes to the literature on international firm activities and firm performance by providing the first evidence on the link of productivity and both exports and foreign direct investment (fdi) in services firms from a highly developed country. It uses unique new data from Germany one of the leading actors on the world market for services that merge information from regular survey...

Recent literature on multinational firms has stressed the importance of low productivity as a barrier to the cross-border expansion of firms. However, firms typically also need external finance to finance the costs of market entry. In addition to productivity-related real barriers, financial constraints may thus restrict market entry. Building on a model of multinational firms facing real and f...