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"Volpe, Christian"
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Can Online Platforms Promote Women-Led Exporting Firms?
How can policymakers promote women-led exporting firms? In this paper, we study the role of online business platforms to reduce informational barriers to exporting for women entrepreneurs. We hypothesize that, if the costs associated with accessing digital platforms are more symmetric across gender than traditional trade costs, digital trade platforms can play an important role in making trade more gender equal. To assess this hypothesis, we combine information on firms’ participation in ConnectAmericas, a free and purely informational online platform, and detailed firm-level export data of a developing country over a long period. We find that participation in this platform is associated with a significantly larger increase in exports for women-managed firms than for men-managed firms in otherwise identical products and destinations. Given existing evidence on the role of women-managed businesses in reducing gender earnings inequality, these results suggest that policies which encourage women participation in online environments, to reduce the informational barriers associated with operating in foreign markets, have the capacity to promote gender equality more broadly.
Journal Article
Did export promotion help firms weather the crisis?
In the global recession of 2009, exports declined precipitously in many countries. We illustrate with firm-level data for Belgium and Peru that the decline was very sudden and almost entirely due to lower export sales by existing exporters. After the recession, exports rebounded almost equally quickly and we evaluate whether export promotion programs were an effective tool aiding this recovery. We show that firms taking advantage of this type of support did better during the crisis, controlling flexibly for systematic differences between supported and control firms. The primary mechanism we identify is that supported firms are generally more likely to survive on the export market and, in particular, are more likely to continue exporting to countries hit by the financial crisis. In terms of absolute magnitudes, the mid-point of the range of estimates suggest a 6% to 11%, respectively for Belgium and Peru, higher probability of survival on the export market for supported firms and approximately 20% to 10% higher exports for surviving exporters.
Journal Article
SMEs in Argentina: who are the exporters?
There exists a growing body of literature which looks at export decisions made by firms. Most studies focus on developed countries and do not explore whether different behavioral patterns prevail over the firm size distribution. This paper aims at filling this gap in the literature by analyzing the export behavior of a statistically representative sample of 192 small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in a developing country, Argentina, over the period 1996-1998. We find that the level of employment, sourcing from abroad, investment in product improvement, and average productivity are associated with higher probability of exporting. Training activities for employees are important to export outside of MERCOSUR.
Journal Article
Entering new country and product markets: does export promotion help?
Entering new export markets is primarily a discrete choice. Even though several empirical papers have used modeling strategies consistent with this fact, no study has examined the effects of public policies aimed at affecting this decision within this setting. In this paper we assess the impact of trade promotion activities on export outcomes using trade support and highly disaggregated export data for the entire population of exporters of Uruguay, a small developing country, over the period 2000-2007 to estimate a binary outcome model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that trade supporting activities have helped firms reach new destination countries and introduce new differentiated products.
Journal Article
Information barriers, export promotion institutions, and the extensive margin of trade
This paper assesses the role played by export promotion institutions in shaping the extensive margin of Latin American and Caribbean countries' exports over the period 1995-2004. We find that the presence of offices of export promotion agencies abroad favors an increase in the number of differentiated goods that are exported, whereas a larger number of diplomatic representations in the importer countries seem to be associated with exports of a larger number of homogeneous goods.
Journal Article
Regional Business Cycles and National Economic Borders: What Are the Effects of Trade in Developing Countries?
Using regional gross product data for Argentina and Brazil over the period 1961-2000, we find that business cycle synchronization within countries is substantially larger than across them. Factors such as monetary policy and large country-specific shocks play a significant role in explaining this observed border effect. Furthermore, our GMM single and multiple equation estimates based on Brazilian states and Argentinean national data provide indicative evidence that the higher level of trade among regions within a country is an important factor that accounts for differences in output correlations across countries.
Journal Article
Trade Policy and Specialization in Developing Countries
This paper examines the impact of trade policy on specialization patterns in ten Latin American countries over the period 1985-1998. These countries are natural case studies because in the last decades they implemented comprehensive trade liberalization programs, both generally and preferentially, starting from relatively high tariff protection levels. Our econometric results suggest that reducing own most favored nation tariffs is associated with increasing manufacturing production specialization. Furthermore, we find that preferential trade liberalization and differences in the degree of unilateral openness have resulted in increased dissimilarities in manufacturing production structures across countries. These results are robust across specialization measures and estimation methods.
Journal Article
The Impact of South-South Preferential Trade Agreements on Industrial Development: An Empirical Test
Preferential trade agreements could lead to a reallocation of resources across sectors and countries. Production patterns resulting from North-North regional integration initiatives have been documented in several studies. However, empirical evidence on South-South trade agreements is limited. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap in the empirical literature by looking at the effects of the establishment of MERCOSUR on manufacturing production patterns in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay over the period 1985-1998. We find that deepened preferential trade liberalization has fostered a reshaping of manufacturing production structures according to regional comparative advantage in labor and skilled labor. Furthermore, declining internal tariffs have weakened agglomeration forces determined by the distribution of market sizes. By using GMM estimation techniques, we ensure that these results are robust to endogeneity and serial correlation.
Journal Article
Economic Integration and Manufacturing Concentration Patterns: Evidence from MERCOSUR
Over the past two decades, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay have implemented unilateral trade liberalization programs and formed MERCOSUR. The effects of these reforms on production structures in these countries have not received a great deal of attention. This paper analyses patterns of relative manufacturing concentration in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay over the period 1985-1998. Our results indicate that localisation of demand and comparative advantages are the main driving forces of these patterns. The establishment of MERCOSUR has fostered the relative importance of factor endowments and production linkages in shaping the spatial distribution of manufacturing in the above three countries. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article