This paper documents for the first time the relationship between profitability and three typesof international trade activities – exports, imports and two-way trade. It uses unique newrepresentative data for manufacturing enterprises from Germany, one of the leading actorson the world market...

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents thatexporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. Thispositive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies aftercontrolling for observed...