The Exporter Productivity Premium along theProductivity Distribution: First Evidence from aQuantile Regression Approach for Fixed EffectsPanel Data Models

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents thatexporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. Thispositive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies aftercontrolling for observed and unobserved firm characteristics in regression models includingfirm fixed effects. These studies test for a difference in productivity between exporters andnon-exporters at the conditional mean of the productivity distribution. However, if firms areheterogeneous, it is possible that the size of the premium varies over the productivitydistribution. In this paper we apply a newly developed estimator for fixed-effects quantileregression models to estimate the exporter productivity premium at quantiles of theproductivity distribution for manufacturing enterprises in Germany, one of the leading actorsin the world market for goods. We show that the premium decreases over the quantiles – adimension of firm heterogeneity that cannot be detected through mean regression....