New exporters benefit more from information spillovers

ABSTRACT

Using the universe of Spanish export transactions over 2000–2012, this paper explores empirically whether the choice of destinations among experienced and new exporters is affected by the number and performance of previous exporters in those destinations. The regression analysis shows that new exporters benefit more from information spillovers than experienced exporters. Results hold when spillovers are measured both at the regional and regional-industry level.

KEYWORDS:

• Exports
• firm-level data
• information spillovers
• regions
• sectors

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• R12
• F14
• F10

Acknowledgments

We thank the Customs and Excise Department of the Spanish Revenue Agency (AEAT) for providing essential information for this paper. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO ECO2016-79650-P, co-financed with FEDER), the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities co-financed with FEDER (RTI2018-100899-B- I00), the Basque Government Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture (IT885-16), the Comunidad de Madrid (H2019/HUM-5761), and the Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO 2018/102).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ We define industries at the 2-digit Harmonized System Classification, which comprises 97 chapters. We remove Chapter 98 and 99 from the analysis. To select the industry in which a firm operates, we calculate the firm’s exports at each HS 2-digit and select the industry with the largest export revenue.

² The main conclusion of the paper remains valid when we run Equation (1)(1) $\begin{array}{rl}& Prob[Entr{y}_{ijkm,t}=1]=\alpha +{\beta }_{1}ln{n}_{jkm,t-1}+{\beta }_{2}growt{h}_{jkm}+{\beta }_{3}ln{n}_{jkm,t-1}growt{h}_{jkm}\\ & +{\beta }_{4}ln{n}_{jkm,t-1}NewExporte{r}_{i,t}+{\beta }_{5}growt{h}_{jkm}NewExporte{r}_{i,t}\\ & +{\beta }_{6}ln{n}_{jkm,t-1}growt{h}_{jkm}NewExporte{r}_{i,t}+{\gamma }_{i,t}+{\gamma }_{jkm}+{ }_{ijkm,t}\end{array}$(1) separately year by year.

³ These probabilities are 1.09 and 1.33 times larger than the unconditional probability, respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Eusko Jaurlaritza [IT885-16];Generalitat Valenciana [PROMETEO 2018/102];Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities [RTI2018-100899-B-I00].