Learning-by-Doing, Learning-by-Exporting, and Productivity: Evidence from Colombia

By A. Fernandes, Alberto E. Isgut. 2005

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The empirical evidence on whether participation in export markets increases plant-level productivity has been inconclusive so far. The authors explain this inconclusiveness by drawing on Arrow's (1962) characterization of learning-by-doing, which suggests focusing on young plants and using measures of export experience rather than export participation. They find strong evidence of learning-by-exporting for young Colombian manufacturing plants between 1981 and 1991: total factor productivity increases 4-5 percent for each additional year a plant has exported, after controlling for the effect of current exports on total factor productivity. Learning-by-exporting is more important for young than for old plants and in industries that deliver a larger percentage of their exports to high-income countries.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/633e3ff8d6789b24079c113ec083386abc8bbdc8

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Citations in the corpus

Learning-by-Exporting: What We Know and What We Would Like to Know (2012, methodology): “A matching approach on LBE, pioneered by Wagner (2002), was followed by several authors (e.g., Girma et al., 2004; Fernandes and Isgut, 2005; De Loecker, 2007; Tekin, 2007).”
FIRM HETEROGENEITY, EXPORTING AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT* (2007, unknown): “Some have argued that learning is likely to be specific to some firms, such as those that are young (Delgado et al. 2002; Fernandes and Isgut, 2005), or highly exposed to export markets (Kraay, 1999; Castellani, 2002; Girma, Görg and Strobl, 2004; Damijan et al.”
Learning-by-Exporting Effects: Are They for Real? (2015, methodology): “19 In our working paper (Fernandes and Isgut (2005)), we included the two subcomponents of output experience separately in the regressions and found a positive effect of the cumulative production index on TFP but a negative effect of age – 1 on TFP.”
Firm Productivity and Exports: Evidence from Ethiopian Manufacturing (2009, methodology): “While some devote considerable resources to exporting, others – only marginally involved with little scope for learning – would probably generate a downward bias in the estimated learning-by-exporting effect (Fernandes and Isgut, 2005).”
Learning-by-Exporting: Continuous Productivity Improvements or Capacity Utilization Effects? Evidence from Slovenian Firms (2006, background): “2 Evidence of learning-by-exporting is also found by Baldwin and Gu (2003) on Canadian data, and by Fernandes and Isgut (2005) for Colombia.”