CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Exporting and Productivity

May 2000

Working Paper Number:

CES-00-07

Abstract

Exporting is often touted as a way to increase economic growth. This paper examines whether exporting has played any role in increasing productivity growth in U.S. manufacturing. Contemporaneous levels of exports and productivity are indeed positively correlated across manufacturing industries. However, tests on industry data show causality from productivity to exporting but not the reverse. While exporting plants have substantially higher productivity levels, we find no evidence that exporting increases plant productivity growth rates. However, within the same industry, exporters do grow faster than non-exporters in terms of both shipments and employment. We show that exporting is associated with the reallocation of resources from less efficient to more efficient plants. In the aggregate, these reallocation effects are quite large, making up over 40 percent of total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector. Half of this reallocation to more productive plants occurs within industries and the direction of the reallocation is towards exporting plants. The positive contribution of exporters even shows up in import-competing industries and non-tradable sectors. The overall contribution of exporters to manufacturing productivity growth far exceeds their shares of employment and output.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
production, productive, macroeconomic, manufacturing, industrial, growth, import, export, labor, produce, efficiency, shipment, export growth, exporting, exporter, regression, producing, econometrician, gdp, firms exporting, exported

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech, including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Annual Survey of Manufactures, Standard Industrial Classification, Longitudinal Research Database, Ordinary Least Squares, Total Factor Productivity, National Bureau of Economic Research, Federal Reserve Bank, World Bank, Retirement History Survey, New York University

Similar Working Papers Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural network model know as Doc2Vec.

Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers. Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.

The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Exporting and Productivity' are listed below in order of similarity.