Firm Heterogeneity, Exporting and Foreign Direct Investment

Abstract

A rapidly expanding literature on firm heterogeneity and firm level globalisation strategies has developed over the last decade. There are new insights on why some firms export and others do not, why some firms fail to survive in export markets and some choose to produce overseas rather than export. This article provides a synthesis and evaluation of this literature. It reviews both new theories of firms in an open economy context and the extensive microeconometric evidence base, which has now developed. It highlights the implications of this evidence base for policy and includes an assessment of how the research agenda may evolve. Copyright 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation Royal Economic Society 2007.

Cross-Border Investment, Heterogeneous Workers, and Employment Security – Evidence from Germany

“…It can be seen that the ratio of both outward and inward FDI is particularly high in technology intensive industries like computers and office machinery, motor vehicles, and electrical machinery, which is in conformity with most of the previous literature (Greenaway and Kneller, 2007). In line with official statistics there has been an increase in overall inward and outward FDI within the sample period (Bundesbank, 2009).…”

Technology and costs in international competitiveness: From countries and sectors to firms

“…The robust evidence about heterogeneity in firms performances along every dimension one is able to observe is extremely robust (see among the others Bartelsman and Doms, 2000;Dosi and Grazzi, 2006;Dosi and Nelson, 2010), and such heterogeneity holds also when only the subset of exporting firms is taken into account (Bernard and Jensen, 2004;Mayer et al, 2011;Greenaway and Kneller, 2007). One consequence is that estimates obtained at the aggregate level might not be isomorphic to what happens at the firm level.…”

Learning by Exporting: Do Firm Characteristics Matter? Evidence from Argentinian Panel Data

“…We investigate the link between exports and productivity using data on 1 See Wagner (2007) and Greenaway and Kneller (2007) the performance of Argentinian manufacturing firms for the period 1992-2001. Exploiting the great level of detail on firm activities provided by this unique dataset, we are able to offer a thorough evaluation of the learning-byexporting hypothesis.…”