Exports and Productivity in Germany

Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the plant level, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and productivity in Germany, a leading actor on the world market for manufactured goods.It applies and extends the now standard aprroach from the international literature to document that the positive productivitydifferential of exporters compared to non-exporters is statistically significant, and substantial, even when observed firm characteristics and unobserved dirm specific effects are controlled for...