International Trade and Productivity: Firm-Level Evidence from Ukraine

The paper empirically assesses microeconomic exporting-productivity nexus using the data for Ukrainian manufacturing firms for the years 2000-2005. The results of the estimation show that firms with higher total factor productivity (TFP) levels in the period prior to entry are much more likely to enter export markets. Also age, size and intangible assets of the firm have significant positive influence on the probability of exporting. In testing learning-by-exporting effect I employ propensity score matching to address issues of endogeneity and sample selection. When the estimation is done for the whole universe of firms in the dataset, the results go in line with common trends and suggest significant positive post-entry productivity effect for the firms that enter export markets for the first time (in the t, t+1 and t+2 periods). At the industry level the results confirm the presence of learning-by-exporting effect in some industries. However the effect is not universal and varies between different types of exporting firms.