Les firmes françaises dans le commerce de service

This paper is the first to use the Banque de France database on firm-level exports and imports of services. We first show that firms trading services are bigger, more productive and pay higher wages than the purely domestic ones. Second, exports are very concentrated among a few numbers of firms. Finally, firms from the service sector are two to five times smaller than the industrial firms which trade services. We end up with an econometric estimation à la Bernard and Jensen (2004) where we show that previous export of both goods and services is an important determinant of present exports of services.