Firms’ productivity and internationalization: a statistical dominance test

Abstract

The literature on firm's internationalization establishes a direct relationship between productivity and foreign activities. This paper extends the usual tests on this relationship in two areas: first, it distinguishes the main stages in the internationalization process (multinationals and exporters); second, as tests of difference of means may be insufficient, statistical dominance tests of the productivity distribution have been formulated.

Notes

Exceptions are Delgado et al. (2002), who test statistical dominance of productivity levels and changes of Spanish firms as they export and become exporters, and Girma et al. (2003) who analyse the productivity levels and growth rate for the same three kinds of firms in their test of the Helpman et al. (2004) model, although the population of UK firms shows a lesser percentage of non-exporters than the Spanish one.