Exporting and Plant-Level Efficiency Gains: It’s in the Measure
By Alvaro Garcia-Marin, Nico Voigtländer. Journal of Political Economy, 2019
134 citations recorded by the source corpus.
While there is strong evidence that more productive plants select into exporting, the literature has struggled to identify export-related efficiency gains within plants. We show that this is due to the common use of revenue-based productivity measures (TFPR): more efficient producers tend to charge lower prices, leading to a downward bias in TFPR. Using census panels of Chilean, Colombian, and Mexican manufacturing plants, we find sizable efficiency gains after export entry based on efficiency measures that are not affected by output prices. Evidence suggests that a complementarity between exporting and investment in technology is an important driver of these gains.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/226e9492f3aeed5f55d353eded0c9bdea28f913b
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Acquisitions, markups, efficiency, and product quality: Evidence from India (2018, background): “Finally, another explanation for differences between changes in measured TFP and marginal costs is measurement error (Marin and Voigtländer, 2013) which could potentially bias estimated TFP effects towards zero.”
- On the Identification of Gross Output Production Functions (2020, methodology): “….50 A common drawback of models with 47 For example, see Pavcnik (2002); Kasahara and Rodrigue (2008); Coşar, Guner, and Tybout (2016); and Garcia-Marin and Voigtländer (2019) for recent papers using data from either Chile or Colombia (or both), and for various other countries, see…”
- Exporting and Firm Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment (2017, unknown): “In contrast, several papers using alternative approaches to deal with selection (e.g., matching estimators or instrumental variables) find some support for learning; see de Loecker (2007, 2013), Park et al. (2010), and Marin and Voigtlander (2013).”
- Heterogeneous Markups, Growth, and Endogenous Misallocation (2020, background): “From an empirical point of view, there is also substantial evidence that mark-ups vary systematically in the cross-section of firms (De Loecker and Warzynski, 2012; Garcia and Voigtländer, 2013), that they respond to policy changes (De Loecker et al.”
- The Impact of Trade Liberalization on Firm Productivity and Innovation (2018, unknown): “For a discussion of the importance of differ‑ entiating between TFPQ and markups, see Foster, Haltiwanger, and Syverson (2008), Gar‑ cia Marin and Voigtländer (2017), De Loecker and Goldberg (2014), and De Loecker and van Biesebroeck (2018).”