Using unique new data and a recently introduced non-linear decomposition technique this paper shows that the huge difference in the propensity to export between West and East German plants is to a large part due to differences in firm size and human capital intensity.

This study reports results from an empirical investigation of business services sector firms that (start to) export, comparing exporters to firms that serve the national market only. We estimate identically specified empirical models using comparable enterprise level data from France, Germany,...

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents that exporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. This positive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies after controlling for...

In public discussion in Germany it is often argued that jobs are mainly created in small and medium-sized firms (i.e. the Mittelstandʺ), whereas large firms tend to reduce their number of jobs. An empirical analysis for the period 1999 to 2005 with data of all western and eastern German firms...

A stylized fact from the literature on the Micro-econometrics of International Trade and a central implication of the heterogeneous firm models from the New New Trade Theory is that exporters are more productive than non-exporters. It is argued that this exporter productivity premium is due to...

This paper uses a new tailor-made data set to investigate the differences in extensive and intensive margins of exports in manufacturing firms from East Germany and West Germany. It documents that these margins do still differ in 2010, 20 years after the re-unification of Germany. West German...

Many plant-level studies find that average wages in exporting firms are higher than in non-exporting firms from the same industry and region. This paper uses a large set of linked employer-employee data from Germany to analyze this exporter wage premium. We show that the wage differential...