Heterogeneous firms are at the heart of both the New New International Trade Theory and the Micro-econometrics of International Firm Activities. One important aim of micro-econometric studies is to uncover stylized facts that hold over space and time, and that can both inspire theoretical models that are based on “realistic” assumptions, and inform policy debates in an evidence-based way. Which results from the thousands of empirical estimates reported in the literature on the micro-econometrics of international firm activities do we consider as convincing? Based on my own experience from the last twenty years I use the opportunity of this paper to make twelve recommendations that, hopefully, will help to find the right way on the thorny road from estimation results to stylized facts. I will deal with the following topics: comparisons of means vs. comparisons of distributions; extremely different firms, or outliers; unobserved heterogeneity; simultaneous occurrence of differences across quantiles, outliers, and unobserved heterogeneity; heterogeneous effects of international firm activities on firm performance; replication; within-study replication by international research teams; meta-analysis; and talking to practitioners.

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From Estimation Results to Stylized Facts Twelve Recommendations for Empirical Research in International Activities of Heterogeneous Firms

The declining quality of jobs has emerged as a key challenge for researchers and policymakers in the twenty-first century. The growing realization that the quality of jobs is central to addressing a myriad of social and economic problems— such as economic development, family formation and social

Declining Job Quality in the United States: Explanations and Evidence

Reliable information on the characteristics of exporting and non-exporting firms is important for providing theorists and policy-makers with evidence-based guidance. This holds true especially for Germany, a leading actor on the world markets for goods and services. This paper provides a synopsis and a critical assessment of 51 empirical studies on exports and firm characteristics based on data for German firms (establishments or enterprises) that were published over the last 20 years. I argue that this literature is not suited to provide the stylized facts needed. Reasons include the widespread use of non-representative small cross-section samples, the use of data for establishments (local production units) instead of enterprise-level data, the lack of information on important firm characteristics (including physical capital intensity and information related to innovation activities), the application of econometric methods that are not appropriate to model the share of exports in total sales and...

Exports and Firm Characteristics in Germany: A Survey of Empirical Studies (1991 to 2011)

Labor of love? The influence of work-conditions among self-employed and work stress

In the 1930s, engineers at Toyota began to work on adapting Fordist mass production to the conditions in Japan at the time: a small market that could not justify huge volumes with dedicated machinery, coupled with severe resource constraints. Their goal was to develop a production system based on lower volumes with low inventories. Toyota didn’t implement its first compete just-in-time system until 1958, and was not able to fully debug its kanban (continuous flow) system until 1962, after which it was adopted companywide (Tolliday 1998). Core elements of what became the Toyota Production System were widely adopted across Japanese industry, although companies such as Nissan, Honda, NEC and others adopted the practices selectively and integrated them into their own systems (Boyer 1998; Freyssenet et al. 1998; Kenney and Florida 1993).

The Lean Labor Process: Global Diffusion, Societal Effects, Contradictory Implementation

This codebook describes the content and structure of the American Working Conditions Survey data (AWCS) which was fielded on the RAND American Life Panel (ALP) in 2015.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/tools/TL200/TL269/RAND_TL269.pdf

The American Working Conditions Survey Data: Codebook and Data Description

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents that exporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. This positive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies after controlling for observed and unobserved firm characteristics in regression models including firm fixed effects. These studies test for a difference in productivity between exporters and non-exporters at the conditional mean of the productivity distribution. However, if firms are heterogeneous, it is possible that the size of the premium varies over the productivity distribution. In this paper we apply a newly developed estimator for fixed-effects quantile regression models to estimate the exporter productivity premium at quantiles of the productivity distribution for manufacturing enterprises in Germany, one of the leading actors in the world market for goods. We show that the premium decreases over the quantiles – a dimension of firm heterogeneity that cannot be detected through mean regression.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/dp5112.pdf?abstractid=1663132&mirid=1

The Exporter Productivity Premium Along the Productivity Distribution: First Evidence from a Quantile Regression Approach for Fixed Effects Panel Data Models

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents that exporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. This positive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies after controlling for observed and unobserved firm characteristics in regression models including firm fixed effects. These studies test for a difference in productivity between exporters and non-exporters at the conditional mean of the productivity distribution. However, if firms are heterogeneous, it is possible that the size of the premium varies over the productivity distribution. In this paper we apply a newly developed estimator for fixed-effects quantile regression models to estimate the exporter productivity premium at quantiles of the productivity distribution for manufacturing enterprises in Germany, one of the leading actors in the world market for goods. We show that the premium decreases over the quantiles  a dimension of firm heterogeneity that cannot be detected through mean regression.

https://www.leuphana.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Forschungseinrichtungen/ifvwl/WorkingPapers/wp_182_Upload.pdf

The exporter productivity premium along the productivity distribution: First evidence from a quantile regression approach for fixed effects panel data models

David Powell

Papers

The American Working Conditions Survey Data: Codebook and Data Description

The Exporter Productivity Premium Along the Productivity Distribution: First Evidence from a Quantile Regression Approach for Fixed Effects Panel Data Models

The exporter productivity premium along the productivity distribution: First evidence from a quantile regression approach for fixed effects panel data models