Abstract
We present a set of empirical regularities that characterize the activity of Greek exporters. We decompose firm-level exports by their margins (numbers of products and destinations, export values, quantities, prices) and relate them to skilled relative to unskilled employment and wages, and financial conditions. Our findings corroborate main motivating facts from existing studies on the role of quality for firm heterogeneity in international trade.
We thank R. Calmuc for excellent research assistance and participants of the CESifo–Delphi Conference 2015 for comments and suggestions on a preliminary draft. We also thank A. Crespo and E. Dinopoulos for many helpful discussions. Financial support through the project Aristeia II Action of the Operational Programme Education and Lifelong Learning (No. 3879), co-funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) and national resources, is acknowledged.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In the micro-exporting literature, Muûls (2015) uses a similar credit score to explore empirically its effects on firm sales and the numbers of products exported and destinations served. The author reports that a higher credit score is associated with higher growth rates in all the aforementioned margins.
- 3.
Notice that, as pointed out by Minetti and Zhu (2011), it is possible that, for instance, a firm that faces financial constraints hoards cash or suffers from credit rationing due to high existing debt.
- 4.
In empirical specifications related to labor variables, only a subset of these firms (matched with AMS) are due to data availability.
- 5.
See Arkolakis and Muendler (2013) on the similarities of the Greek dataset with datasets that have been used in the related empirical literature.
- 6.
The wage rate for skilled and unskilled workers is calculated by dividing the wage bill to the number of employees. Denoting the wage bill, employment, and the wage rate by wb, n, and w respectively, we get that \( \frac{w^s}{w^u}\equiv \left(\frac{w{b}^s}{n^s}\right)/\left(\frac{w{b}^u}{n^u}\right)=\left(\frac{w{b}^s}{w{b}^u}\right)\left(\frac{n^u}{n^s}\right) \), where s and u denote skilled and unskilled labor.
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Kalyvitis, S., Katsimi, M. (2021). Export Margins, Employment Skills and Financial Conditions: Stylized Facts from Greek Exporters. In: Kokores, I.T., Pantelidis, P., Pelagidis, T., Yannelis, D. (eds) Money, Trade and Finance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73219-6_3
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