Exports, International Investment, and Plant Performance : Evidence from a Non-Parametric Test

This paper compares the performance of purely domestic plants, domestic exporters and domestic multinationals. For our empirical analysis we utilise a non-parametric approach based on the principle of first order stochastic dominance. Comparing the cumulative distributions of the measures of plant performance across the three types of plants we find that the distributions for multinationals dominate that of domestic exporters and non-exporters, while we do not find clear differences in plant performance between domestic exporters and non-exporters, although the latter finding may be due to the lack of many very small plants in our data set