One of the factors that are thought to be important to make some firms more productive than others is exporting. Bartelsman and Doms (2000) survey of the literature on productivity that uses longitudinal micro-level data sets points out to the link between productivity and exporting as one of the factors this literature has focused on (the rest of factors are regulation, management/ownership, technology and human capital). Studies by Aw and Hwang (1995) on Taiwan; Bernard and Jensen (1995) (1999) on the US; Bernard and Wanger (1997) on Germany; Clerides, Lach and Tybout (1998) on Colombia, Mexico and Marocco; Aw, Chung and Roberts (2000) on Taiwan and South Korea; Girma, Greenaway and Kneller (2002) on the UK, provide evidence on the fact that export oriented firms are more productive than non-exporters.
Sunk costs are the main argument outlined to explain why exporters are more efficient than non-exporters, in particular the existence of higher sunk entry costs for exporters with respect to non-exporters. The argument comes from models of industry dynamics Jovanovic (1982) and Hopenhayn (1992)- and applies also to entry and exit to export markets as suggested by Aw, Chen and Roberts (1997). According to this argument, differences in sunk entry costs can explain productivity differences between exporters and domestic-oriented firms. Building on these ideas Roberts and Tybout (1997), Clerides, Lach and Tybout (1998) and Bernard and Jensen (2001) have developed models of the decision to export. The result that firm’s previous export status is a determinant of the decision to export is interpreted, in term of these models, as a favorable evidence to the existence of sunk entry cost in the export market.
Microsoft Publisher is a Microsoft Office program that helps you design and publish professional-looking print and web-based materials such as brochures, flyers, stationery, newsletters, calendars and more.
NOTE Familiarity with Microsoft Word is recommended before using Publisher.
The following are assorted tips and tutorials for Microsoft Publisher.
Note that some of these are for Publisher 98, but still hold true for newer versions of the software.
The theory of international trade with increasing returns to scale and imperfect competition in production includes analyses of firm location and industry agglomeration that are sometimes referred to as “economic geography”. With increasing returns and interdependencies among firms, parameter changes in trade costs can have interesting and indeed non-monotonic effects on industry location patterns. The recent works by Fujita, Krugman, and Venables (1999), Brackman et. al. (2001), and Baldwin et. al. (2003) present a great deal of research in this interesting and important new sub-field.
One limitation of this location literature is that it almost exclusively deals with geographically integrated firms that conduct all activities from R&D to final production in a single location. But when we examine the industries which motivate this literature, we generally find them dominated by multinational firms. A parallel literature to the economic geography approach considers the endogenous formation of multinational firms. Much of it reflected in Markusen’s (1997, 2002) “knowledge-capital” model. Firms’ location strategies include not just where to located an integrated operation, but include horizontal expansion, producing roughly the same goods and services in multiple locations, and/or vertical strategies in which the production process is geographically fragmented into stages such as R&D, component production, and final assembly.
