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"Learning by exporting refers to the mechanism whereby firms improve their performance (productivity) after entering export markets. Although this mechanism is often mentioned in policy documents, a significant share of econometric studies has not found evidence for this hypothesis. This paper shows that the methods used to come to the latter conclusion suffer from a large internal inconsistency: they rely on an exogenous evolving productivity process. I show how recent proxy estimators can accommodate endogenous productivity processes such as learning by exporting. I rely on my framework to discuss the bias introduced by ignoring such a process and how adjusting for it can lead to detect significant productivity gains upon export entry. I estimate my model on standard firm-level data and find substantial additional productivity gains from entering export markets"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

In this paper I analyze the productivity gains from trade liberalization in the Belgian textile industry. So far, empirical research has established a strong relationship between opening up to trade and productivity, relying almost entirely on deflated sales to proxy for output in the production function. The latter implies that the resulting productivity estimates still capture price and demand shocks which are most likely to be correlated with the change in the operating environment, which invalidate the evaluation of the welfare implications. In order to get at the true productivity gains I propose a simple methodology to estimate a production function controlling for unobserved prices by introducing an explicit demand system. I combine a unique data set containing matched plant-level and product-level information with detailed product-level quota protection information to recover estimates for productivity as well as parameters of the demand side (markups). I find that when correcting for unobserved prices and demand shocks, the estimated productivity gains from relaxing protection are only half (from 6 to only 3 percent) of those obtained with standard techniques.

The process of the East-West integration has come to a point that enlargement appears inevitable. But are these countries really ready to join the EU in tfirms of competitive perfirmance? Firstly, we construct a virtual best practice production frontier for firms active in a European Union member state (EU) and firms in Central and East European (CEE) countries. By means of this common benchmark, we make inferences about the relative technical efficiency of firms in candidate countries. We show that technical efficiency is higher in the EU, however, firms in CEE countries are converging towards the EU average. We show that efficiency is not only different between countries, but even within countries. The latter suggests the need to look at industry-level technical efficiency. Secondly, we combine two existing techniques to develop a methodology to estimate firm level total factor productivity (TFP) change, decomposed into technical change, technical effiency change and a scale component. It is mainly technical change that drives the change in TFP, i.e. technological progress. firms in EU candidate countries are reallocating resources under decreasing returns to scale, leading to an increase in TFP. We suggest interpreting efficiency estimates as measures of firm heterogeneity.