Quantitative Evaluation of Determinants of Export and FDI: Firm-level evidence from Japan

This paper examines determinants of the export and FDI decision, using firm-level data for Japan. Contributions of this paper are twofold. First, this paper employs a mixed logit model to incorporate unobserved characteristics of firms. Second, special attention is paid to quantitative evaluation of effects of the covariates. We find that the impact of productivity on the export and FDI decision is positive and statistically significant but economically negligible in size, despite the theoretical prediction of recent heterogeneous-firm trade models. The impact of the firm size and information spillovers from experienced neighboring firms in the same industry are also positive but small in size. Quantitatively, the dominant determinants of the export and FDI decision are firms' status on internationalization in the previous year and unobserved firm characteristics. The evidence suggests that there may be some kind of inefficiency in the selection process of exporters and FDI firms.