The Impact of Exporting on Firm Productivity: A Meta-Analysis

We conduct a meta-analysis of more than 30 papers that study the causal relationship between exporting and firm productivity. Our results, robust to different specifications and to different weights for each observation, indicate that the impact of exporting upon productivity is higher 1) at developing economies (when compared to developed economies); 2) in the first year that firms start exporting (compared to later years); 3) with other estimators than OLS; and 4) when the sample used in the paper is not restricted to matched firms. Moreover, we find no evidence of publication bias.