May 28, 2010

Firm-level exports and productivity in The Netherlands

This is a background document for CPB Discussion Paper 143: 'Exports and productivity selection effects for Dutch firms'. The SFGO database is a firm-level dataset for The Netherlands that was used for that study.

We report the procedure used to analyze the dataset, and present the main characteristics of the data together with statistics. In addition, we run panel data regressions to test for the presence of export and MNE productivity premia and dynamic regressions to test the self-selection and learning-by-exporting hypothesis.

Our results are consistent with the broad findings of other country-specific firm-level datasets. Hence, we find that there are statistically significant export and MNE productivity premia, there is empirical support to the self-selection hypothesis but no evidence for the learning-by-exporting hypothesis.

Main Document: CPB Discussion Paper 143