Productivity and exporting status of manufacturing firms: Evidence from quantile regressions

Past literature has established the relationship between productivity and exporting. This paper provides further understanding about this issue by examining the productivity effects of export status at different points of the conditional output distribution and by investigating the productivity effects of firms with different exporting status (i.e., new exporters versus continuous exporters). Plant-level data of Turkish manufacturing firms are analyzed using quantile regression techniques. The empirical results indicate that the productivity effect of exporting is present at all points along the conditional output distribution, and this effect increases as one moves from the lower tail to the upper tail of the distribution. Exporting firms that continuously exported throughout the time period have more pronounced productivity effects compared to firms in other categories (i.e., new exporting firms, exporting firms that exit, and exporting firms that switch exporting practices). These results have implications for firm behavior and for targeting policy prescriptions to augment manufacturing competitiveness.