Costs of trade and self-selection into exporting and importing: the case of Turkish manufacturing firms

This paper focuses on self-selection into trade by exporting and importing firms, and on the presence of differential variable and sunk costs between exporters and importers across different categories of imports. We use a rich and recent dataset for Turkish manufacturing firms for the period 2003-10.This allows us to provide a comprehensive analysis of firm heterogeneity and the connection between firm-level performance and international trade. We provide evidence on the remarkable heterogeneity across firms where only-importers (importers) perform better than only-exporters (exporters). We detect a self-selection effect for both importing and exporting firms with a stronger effect for importers. The results suggest that the nature of sunk costs varies between importing and exporting activities with importers facing higher sunk costs. Tari§s represent a potentially important source of variation in the variable costs of trading. When taking the tariffs faced by firms into account, we find that the self-selection effect associated with sunk costs is still present but greatly reduced with a smaller reduction for importers compared to exporters

Wages, Profitability And Market Structure: Threshold Regression Analyses

This paper employs threshold regression techniques to examine the effect of product market structure on real wages and profitability. Using longitudinal data on Turkish manufacturing industries over the period of 1985-2001, we show that market concentration has positive effects on wages and profitability. The positive effect of market concentration on wages is only significant over a certain threshold level whereas, the positive effect of market concentration on profitability exists in both regimes determined by a lower threshold level of concentration but weakens over this threshold. Our results suggest that the imperfectly competitive structure of Turkish manufacturing industry offers more monopoly rent to employers than employees.Wo

Entry to foreign markets and productivity: Evidence from a matched sample of Turkish manufacturing firms

We examine the effects of international trading activities of firms on creating productivity gains in Turkey by using a recent firm-level data set over the period 2003-2010. We establish treatment models and investigate the productivity improvements of firms through trade by using propensity score matching techniques together with difference-in-difference estimates. Three different groups of treatment are constructed: (1) firms that are involved only with import activities, (2) firms that are involved only with export activities and (3) firms that are involved with both export and import activities. The results of the study suggest that both exporting and importing have positive significant effects on total factor productivity (TFP) and labour productivity (LP) of firms. Importing is found to have a greater impact on productivity of firms compared to exporting. Further, two-way trade is found to have more significant effects than those of one-way trade on firm productivity. Finally, our results indicate that international trade has greater impact on LP rather than TFP of firms

Epidemiological, Clinical, and Laboratory Features of Children With COVID-19 in Turkey

Objectives: The aim of this study is to identify the epidemiological, clinical, and laboratory features of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in children