Reliable information on the characteristics of exporting and non-exporting firms is important to guide theorists and policy makers in an evidence based way. This holds true especially for Germany, a leading actor on the world markets for goods and services. This paper makes three contributions...

This paper investigates four cohorts of firms from German manufacturing industries that started to export in the years between 1998 and 2002 and follows them over the five years after the start. Export starters are a rare species and they are small on average compared to incumbent exporters....

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...

Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal enterprise-level data for Germany, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability. It documents that the positive profitability differential of exporters...

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...