The impact of offshoring on average labor productivity is investigated on a panel of 17 manufacturing sectors between 1989-2006. As proxies for offshoring, we use imports and import penetration, defined as the ratio of imports to output. We disaggregate the universe of exporters into low wage...

Feenstra and Ma (2008) develop a monopolistic competition model where firms choose their optimal product scope by balancing the profits from a new variety against the costs of “cannibalizing” sales of existing varieties. While more productive firms always have a higher market share, there is...

A stylized fact from the emerging literature on the micro-econometrics of international trade and a central implication of the heterogeneous firm models from the new new trade theory is that exporters are more productive than non-exporters. It is argued that this exporter-productivity premium is...

This paper presents the first empirical test with German firm level data of a hypothesis derived by Bustos (AER 2011) in a model that explains the decision of heterogeneous firms to export and to engage in R&D. Using a non-parametric test for first order stochastic dominance it is shown that, in...

The use of trade liberalization to enhance manufacturing productivity has been a commonly applied policy in several developing countries since the 1980s. This paper proposes a new methodology to estimate the inter-industry productivity spillovers that may occur in such reforms. The findings from...