Productivity and the extensive margins of trade in German manufacturing firms: Evidence from a non-parametric test

This paper contributes to the literature by comparing the productivity distribution for firms with various numbers of goods traded and various numbers of countries traded with from Germany, one of the leading actors on the world market for goods. It applies a non-parametric test for first-order stochastic dominance of one productivity distribution over another. We find that the larger the number of goods exported or imported, and the larger the number of countries exported to or imported from, the higher is the productivity of the firms – not only on average, but over the whole productivity distribution. This is in line with implications of recent theoretical models of multi-product multi-country trading firms.