IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cfg/cfigwp/12.html

Trade Complexity and Productivity

Author

Listed:
  • Carlo Altomonte
  • Gábor Békés

Abstract

We exploit a panel dataset of Hungarian fi rms merged with country and product-level trade data for the period 1992-2003 to investigate the relation between firms’ trading activities (importing, exporting or both) and productivity. From our transaction data a number of proxies are derived, measuring at the firm level some characteristics of the traded bundles associated to various technological and relationship-speci c dimensions of the trade activity, which we generally refer to as ‘trade complexity’. We find that our indicators of complexity are jointly correlated to the ex-ante productivity of trading fi rms, accounting for an additional third of the overall productivity premium. However, the elasticity of productivity to a change in the trade complexity indicators varies with di fferent indicators of complexity and with the trade status of the fi rm. Policy conclusions are drawn from these findings.

Suggested Citation

  • Carlo Altomonte & Gábor Békés, 2010. "Trade Complexity and Productivity," CeFiG Working Papers 12, Center for Firms in the Global Economy, revised 25 Oct 2010.
    • Handle: RePEc:cfg:cfigwp:12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://resources.cefig.eu/papers/trade_complexity_and_productivity.pdf
    File Function: Trade Complexity and Productivity [pdf]
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F12 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies; Fragmentation
    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
    • L25 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Performance

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cfg:cfigwp:12. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Miklós Koren The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Miklós Koren to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cefighu.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.