Spatial structure and economic network formation of manufacturing exports in Russia

We study the agglomeration effect of exporters on decision of a firm to start exporting and volumes of trade. The unique database of Russian exporters in manufacturing sector for the eight-years period was constructed. It enables us to examine the nature and channels of export spillovers along the product and destination dimensions. At first, we provide the analysis using the existing empirical strategies. Our findings support the previous results, that export spillovers are destination-specific and affect both margins of trade. On the top of that, the large data sample and the usage of multiple fixed effects, that absorb time-variant and time-invariant unobserved characteristics, allowed us to achieve better identification strategy of the export spillover effect. It acts through the narrow group of firms that export the same product to the same destination as exporters nearby. Moreover, we tend to follow network view of international trade (Rauch 1999). The export spillover effect is positive for differentiated goods and negative for homogeneous goods. The presence of other exporters nearby to contiguous or linked country affects positively decision of a firm to export the same product to the same country.