Estimation of Firm-Level Productivity in the Presence of Exports: Evidence from China's Manufacturing

Malikov, Emir and Zhao, Shunan and Kumbhakar, Subal C. (2020): Estimation of Firm-Level Productivity in the Presence of Exports: Evidence from China's Manufacturing.

Abstract

Motivated by the longstanding interest of economists in understanding the nexus between firm productivity and export behavior, this paper develops a novel structural framework for control-function-based nonparametric identification of the gross production function and latent firm productivity in the presence of endogenous export opportunities that is robust to recent unidentification critiques of proxy estimators. We provide a workable identification strategy, whereby the firm's degree of export orientation provides the needed (excluded) relevant independent exogenous variation in endogenous freely varying inputs, thus allowing us to identify the production function. We estimate our fully nonparametric IV model using the Landweber-Fridman regularization with the unknown functions approximated via artificial neural network sieves with a sigmoid activation function which are known for their superior performance relative to other popular sieve approximators, including the polynomial series favored in the literature. Using our methodology, we obtain robust productivity estimates for manufacturing firms from twenty eight industries in China during the 1999-2006 period to take a close look at China's exporter productivity puzzle, whereby exporters are found to exhibit lower productivity levels than non-exports.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: ANN sieves, control function, export, nonparametric, productivity, proxy, regularized estimation, TFP
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D2 - Production and Organizations > D22 - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis; D - Microeconomics > D2 - Production and Organizations > D24 - Production ; Cost ; Capital ; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity ; Capacity; F - International Economics > F1 - Trade > F10 - General; L - Industrial Organization > L1 - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance > L10 - General; L - Industrial Organization > L6 - Industry Studies: Manufacturing > L60 - General

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