Filtern
Erscheinungsjahr
- 2007 (23) (entfernen)
Dokumenttyp
- Research Paper (13)
- Bericht (5)
- Dissertation (2)
- Wissenschaftlicher Artikel (1)
- Diplomarbeit (1)
- Beitrag in Konferenzband (1)
Sprache
- Englisch (23) (entfernen)
Schlagworte
- Export (5)
- Produktivität (5)
- productivity (5)
- Exports (4)
- Personenbezogene Daten (4)
- micro data (4)
- Deutschland (3)
- Discrimination (2)
- Diskriminierung (2)
- Elfter September (2)
Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the plant level, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and productivity for Germany, a leading actor on the world market for manufactured goods. It applies and extends the now standard approach from the international literature to document that the positive productivity differential of exporters compared to non-exporters is statistically significant, and substantial, even when observed firm characteristics and unobserved firm specific effects are controlled for. For West German plants (but not for East German plants) some empirical evidence for self-selection of more productive firms into export markets is found. There is no evidence for the hypothesis that plants which start to export perform better in the three years after the start than their counterparts which do not start to sell their products on the world market. Results for West Germany support the hypothesis that the productivity differential between exporters and nonexporters is at least in part the result of a market driven selection process in which those export starters that have low productivity at starting time fail as a successful exporter in the years after the start, and only those that were more productive at starting time continue to export.
Using panel data from Spain Farinas and Ruano (IJIO 2005) test three hypotheses from a model by Hopenhayn (Econometrica 1992): (H1) Firms that exit in year t were in t-1 less productive than firms that continue to produce in t. (H2) Firms that enter in year t are less productive than incumbent firms in year t. (H3) Surviving firms from an entry cohort were more productive than non-surviving firms from this cohort in the start year. Results for Spain support all three hypotheses. This paper replicates the study using a unique newly available panel data sets for all manufacturing plants from Germany (1995 – 2002). Again, all three hypotheses are supported empirically.
Abstract: A recent survey of 54 micro-econometric studies reveals that exporting firms are more productive than non-exporters. On the other hand, previous empirical studies show that exporting does not necessarily improve productivity. One possible reason for this result is that most previous studies are restricted to analysing the relationship between a firm’s export status and the growth of its labour productivity, using the firms’ export status as a binary treatment variable and comparing the performance of exporting and non-exporting firms. In this paper, we apply the newly developed generalised propensity score (GPS) methodology that allows for continuous treatment, that is, different levels of the firms’ export activities. Using the GPS method and a large panel data set for German manufacturing firms, we estimate the relationship between a firm’s export-sales ratio and its labour productivity growth rate. We find that there is a causal effect of firms’ export activities on labour productivity growth. However, exporting improves labour productivity growth only within a sub-interval of the range of firms’ export-sales ratios.
This paper contributes to the flourishing literature on exports and productivity by using a unique newly available panel of exporting establishments from the manufacturing sector of Germany from 1995 to 2004 to test three hypotheses derived from a theoretical model by Hopenhayn (Econometrica 1992): (H1) Firms that stop exporting in year t were in t-1 less productive than firms that continue to export in t. (H2) Firms that start to export in year t are less productive than firms that export both in year t-1 and in year t. (H3) Firms from a cohort of export starters that still export in the last year of the panel were more productive in the start year than firms from the same cohort that stopped to export in between. While results for West Germany support all three hypotheses, this is only the case for (H1) and (H2) in East Germany.
This paper uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 2000 to 2005 to study the earnings differential between self- and dependent employed German men. Constructing a counterfactual earnings distribution for the self-employed in dependent employment and using quantile regression decompositions we find that the earnings differential over the distribution cannot be explained by differences in endowments. Furthermore, low-earning self-employed could earn more in dependent employment. Finally, the observed earnings advantage for the self-employed at the top of the earnings distribution is not associated with higher returns to observable variables.
This paper analyzes, within a regional growth model, the impact of productive governmental policy and integration on the spatial distribution of economic activity. Integration is understood as enhancing territorial cooperation between the regions, and it describes the extent to which one region may benefit from the other region’s public input, e.g. the extent to which regional road networks are connected. Both integration and the characteristics of the public input crucially affect whether agglomeration arises and if so to which extent economic activity is concentrated: As a consequence of enhanced integration, agglomeration is less likely to arise and concentration will be lower. Relative congestion reinforces agglomeration, thereby increasing equilibrium concentration. Due to the congestion externalities, the market outcome ends up in suboptimally high concentration.
We use comparable micro level panel data for 14 countries and a set of identically specified empirical models to investigate the relationship between exports and productivity. Our overall results are in line with the big picture that is by now familiar from the literature: Exporters are more productive than non-exporters when observed and unobserved heterogeneity are controlled for, and these exporter productivity premia tend to increase with the share of exports in total sales; there is strong evidence in favour of self-selection of more productive firms into export markets, but nearly no evidence in favour of the learning-by-exporting hypothesis. We document that the exporter premia differ considerably across countries in identically specified empirical models. In a meta-analysis of our results we find that countries that are more open and have more effective government report higher productivity premia. However, the level of development per se does not appear to be an explanation for the observed cross-country differences.
Strong sustainability, according to the common definition, requires that different natural and economic capital stocks have to be maintained as physical quantities separately. Yet, in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed. To therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in an operational manner, we propose to use the concept of viability. Viability means that the different components and functions of a dynamic, stochastic system at any time remain in a domain where the future existence of these components and functions is guaranteed with sufficiently high probability. We develop a unifying and general ecological-economic concept of viability that encompasses the traditional ecological and economic notions of viability as special cases. It provides an operational criterion of strong sustainability under conditions of uncertainty. We illustrate this concept and demonstrate its usefulness by applying it to livestock grazing management in semi-arid rangelands.
The paper demonstrates how the E–stability principle introduced by Evans and Honkapohja can be applied to models with heterogeneous and private information in order to assess the stability of rational expectations equilibria under learning. The paper extends already known stability results for the Grossman and Stiglitz model to a more general case with many differentially informed agents and to the case where information is endogenously acquired by optimizing agents. In both cases it turns out that the rational expectations equilibrium of the model is inherently E-stable and thus locally stable under recursive least squares learning.