A positive correlation between productivity and export market participation has been well documented in producer micro data. Recent empirical studies and theoretical analyses have emphasized that this may reflect the producer's other investment activities, particularly investments in R&D or new...

This paper estimates a dynamic structural model of a producer's decision to invest in R&D and export, allowing both choices to endogenously affect the future path of productivity. Using plant-level data for the Taiwanese electronics industry, both activities are found to have a positive effect...

Long-duration employment opportunities are a necessary condition for workers to hold lifetime jobs. This paper uses longitudinal data on individual U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963-1982 to estimate the age and completed spell distributions for employment positions. The results indicate that,...

This article quantifies the role of plant construction, expansion, contraction, and closing in generating net and gross changes in U.S. manufacturing employment over the 1963-82 period. A new longitudinal data set, constructed from the plant-level observations collected in the last five Census...

This paper examines the patterns of postentry growth and failure for over 200,000 plants that entered the U.S. manufacturing sector in the 1967-77 period. The postentry patterns of growth and failure vary significantly with observable employer characteristics. Plant failure rates decline with...

Recent theoretical models of entry predict that, in the presence of sunk costs, current market participation is affected by prior experience. This paper quantifies the effect of prior exporting experience on the decisions of Colombian manufacturing plants to participate in foreign markets. It...