Determinants of Export Behaviour of German Business Services Companies

The determinants of export behaviour at firm level have been widely investigated for manufacturing companies. By contrast, what has remained largely neglected is a detailed investigation in the service sector. As aggregate statistics show, international trade in services has grown significantly over the last few years. However, it is unclear why some companies export and others do not. This paper presents some initial results about the German business services sector at firm level. Using a unique panel dataset of enterprises from the business services sector (transport, storage and communication, real estate, renting and business activities) for the years 2003 to 2005, we analysed the impact of several firm-specific characteristics such as size, productivity, human capital, experience on the national market in Germany, etc. on the firms’ export performance. Further, we used the pooled fractional probit estimator, recently introduced by Papke & Wooldridge, an approach that considers both the special nature of the export intensity variable and in addition unobserved time-invariant characteristics. When there is no control for fixed enterprise effects the overall results are in line with previous studies. When there is a control for unobserved heterogeneity, the positive effects of productivity and human capital disappear, indicating that these variables are not per se positively related to export performance, but rather to time-constant characteristics that are unobserved. Size and product diversification still have a positive and significant effect.Business services sector, export behaviour, firm performance

Exporter Performance in the German Business Services Sector: First Evidence from the Services Statistics Panel

A wide range of empirical studies has analysed exporter performance, especially the relationship between exports and productivity in the manufacturing sector. By contrast, a detailed investigation of the services sector has remained largely neglected. To close this gap, this paper focuses on the relationship between exports and several performance characteristics in the German business services sector—average wage, productivity, size and turnover profitability—in order to determine whether export premia and self-selection into export markets exist in the business services sector. To ensure the comparability of the results with those from the manufacturing sector, empirical models used to analyse the manufacturing sector are transferred to investigate the business services.export premia, self-selection into export markets, business services

Determinants of Export Behaviour of German Business Services Companies

The determinants of export behaviour at firm level have been widely investigated for manufacturing companies. By contrast, what has remained largely neglected is a detailed investigation in the service sector. As aggregate statistics show, international trade in services has grown significantly over the last few years. However, it is unclear why some companies export and others do not. This paper presents some initial results about the German business services sector at firm level. Using a unique panel dataset of enterprises from the business services sector (transport, storage and communication, real estate, renting and business activities) for the years 2003 to 2005, we analysed the impact of several firm-specific characteristics such as size, productivity, human capital, experience on the national market in Germany, etc. on the firms' export performance. Further, we used the pooled fractional probit estimator, recently introduced by Papke & Wooldridge, an approach that considers both the special nature of the export intensity variable and in addition unobserved time-invariant characteristics. When there is no control for fixed enterprise effects the overall results are in line with previous studies. When there is a control for unobserved heterogeneity, the positive effects of productivity and human capital disappear, indicating that these variables are not per se positively related to export performance, but rather to time-constant characteristics that are unobserved. Size and product diversification still have a positive and significant effect.Business services sector, export behaviour, firm performance

Exports and Productivity in the German Business Services Sector. First Evidence from the Turnover Tax Statistics Panel

A wide range of empirical studies has analysed the relationship between exports and productivity in the manufacturing sector. By contrast, a detailed investigation of the services sector has remained neglected. To close this gap, this paper provides first evidence about export and productivity in the German business services sector. The database used is the German turnover tax statistics panel, which allows for the first time a detailed longitudinal analyses of exporting business services enterprises. Similar to the manufacturing sector, these enterprises are more productive than non-exporters, and more productive business services enterprises self-select into export markets. However, no evidence is found concerning the hypotheses that exporting increases productivity.export; productivity; business services; panel data

Asymptotics of the two-stage spatial sign correlation

Acknowledgments This research was supported in part by the Collaborative Research Grant 823 of the German Research Foundation. The authors wish to thank the editors and referees for their careful handling of the manuscript. They further acknowledge the anonymous referees of the article Spatial sign correlation (J. Multivariate Anal. 135, pages 89–105, 2015), who independently of each other suggested to further explore the properties of two-stage spatial sign correlation.Non peer reviewedPreprin

How does economic integration influence employment and wages in border regions? The case of the EU-enlargement 2004 and Germany’s eastern border

This paper considers the (short run) employment and wage effects of the 2004 EUenlargement on firms located close to Germany’s Eastern border. We use a 50% sample of Germans plants and apply difference-in-differences-estimators combined with a matching approach. We evaluate changes in total employment, the employment shares of low-skilled and Eastern European workers and the wages for low-skilled, skilled and high-skilled workers in various sectors. Our results suggest negative (short-run) effects of the EU-enlargement on employment in construction and the business services sector, where we also find negative wage effects. Wages and employment in manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants and social and personal service activities seem to have been relatively less affected.EU-enlargement, economic integration, employment, wages

Robust estimates of exporter productivity premia in German business services enterprises

A large and growing number of micro-econometric studies show that exporting firms are more productive than firms that sell their products on the home market only. This so-called exporter productivity premium qualifies as a stylized fact. Only recently researchers started to look at the role of extreme observations, or outliers, in shaping these findings. These studies use micro-econometric methods that are robust against outliers to show that very small shares of firms with extreme values drive the result. The large exporter productivity premium found for samples of firms including outliers are dramatically smaller in samples without these extreme observations. Evidence on this, however, is limited so far to firms from manufacturing industries. This note adds comparable evidence for firms from the business services industries. We find that the estimated exporter productivity premium is statistically significant and relevant from an economic point of view when a standard fixed effects estimator is used to control for unobserved firm characteristics, but that it drops to zero when a robust estimator is applied.Exporter productivity premium, services firms, robust estimation, panel data

Mortality, Fertility, Education and Capital Accumulation in a Simple OLG Economy

We develop a simple overlapping generations model to analytically show that population aging leads to increased educational efforts through a general equilibrium effect. The key mechanism at work in the model is that scarcity of raw labor increases the rate of return to human capital relative to physical capital. While a reduction in the birth rate is shown to unambiguously increase educational efforts, increases in the survival rate have ambiguous effects. Falling birth rates unambiguously increase capital per worker while the effects of rising survival rates are ambiguous. When evaluating our model using a calibrated version we find that education always in- creases if life expectancy rises but the effect on the capital stock is still ambiguous and depends on the parameters of the model. We conclude that our model is a useful laboratory to highlight the various potentially offsetting effects at work in models with endogenous education and overlapping generations which is key for understanding the magnitudes of results of applied quantitative general equilibrium analyses employing such a framework.

The impact of the 2004 EU-enlargement on enterprise performance and exports of service enterprises in the German eastern border region

We consider the impact of the 2004 EU-enlargement on enterprise performance and the exporting behavior of German service enterprises in Germany’s eastern border region. Our results from regression adjusted difference-in-differences-estimators combined with matching and panel data from official statistics suggest that the EU-enlargement resulted in a decline by circa 1 percent in the turnover and the profitability of large enterprises in the border region, respectively. For small enterprises, we find an annual increase in turnover by 2.7% in both 2004 and 2005 and an annual decrease in profitability by 1.8 and 2.6 percentage points in 2004 and 2005 respectively.EU-enlargement, enterprise performance, exports