外籍工人如何促进出口.docx

1 IntroductionAn extensive literature investigates the firm-level determinants of trade performance on foreign markets. Empirical regularities suggest that trade outcomes are mainly determined by (i) the idiosyncratic firm characteristics and (ii) the capacity of the firm to overcome large countryspecific trade costs. Successful exporters are more productive and larger in terms of employment, capital-intensity and financial capabilities as compared to non-successful exporters and nonexporting firms (Bernard et al., 2012). This within-industry selection of exporting firms through productivity has been rationalized by the seminal model of Melitz (2003). On the other hand, informational barriers which are usually approximated by the geographic and cultural distance between countries, are known to deter export outcomes (Disdier and Head, 2008).Foreign workers impact both aforementioned trade determinants. First, some papers show that employing foreign workers generates a productivity-enhancing task specialization within the firm (Peri and Sparber, 2009). This literature echoes another strand of results supporting the productivity-enhancing effect of cultural and ethnic diversity among skilled workers (Goldin et aL, 2011; Trax et aL, 2015). So far, only a limited attempt has been done to bridge this literature investigating the productivity effect of immigrants, and the trade-migration literature. To the best of our knowledge, Mitaritonna et al. (2016) are the first to explicit the link between foreign workers, productivity and exports.Second, a number of studies provide evidence that immigrants convey valuable information on their origin countries which decreases ad valorem and fixed costs faced by exporters. Thus, they foster trade between their origin and host countries at the extensive and the intensive margins. These results have mainly been supported by macro-level studies (Gould, 1994; Rauch, 2001; Parsons and Winters, 2014). At the firm level, the impact of the firm's workforce on its export outcomes has attracted little attention. Hiller (2013) shows that firms should employ foreign workers in order to access the knowledge embedded in the foreign population. Both Hiller (2013) and Hatzigeorgiou and Lodefalk (2016) find that an increase in foreign employment at the firm level is associated with an increase in exports to the immigrant origin country.In the present paper, we investigate the different channels through which foreign workers impact firm-level exports at both margins. To this end, we develop a theoretical framework with heterogeneous firms in monopolistic competition resting upon the model of Melitz (2003). We assume that foreign workers allow their firm to be more productive, and convey valuable information to their employer on foreign markets, particularly on their origin country. Our model predicts that foreign workers foster exports at both margins toward any destination country. This effect can be decomposed in a general effect - to which any foreign worker contributes - and a destination-specific effect - to which only foreign workers who were bom in the export destination contribute. Doing so, we show that export cutoffs are destination- and firm-specific and depend on the firm's exogenous productivity and its employment of foreign workers.We test these predictions using a dataset on French manufacturing firms over the 1997- 2008 period. We identify foreign-born workers in a comprehensive matched employer-employee dataset (from firms' annual employee declarations) that we combine with trade data at theFigure 3: Distributions of total exports by types of firmsKernel distributions of exports (1997-2008)If the two types of firms are not different on average, except in their export outcomes, it gives a rationale to compare two firms that only differ in their foreign employment to identify the effect of foreign workers on exports. In that case, the comparison is less likely to be flawed and biased by firm size or firm performance, which do not seem on average to be correlated with foreign employment. This aggregate information is an additional support for the following theoretical analysis based upon first-order selection effects. It also supports the following empirical strategy, which consists in comparing trade outcomes from firms that only differ in their foreign employment.4 The theoretical frameworkIn this section, we use a model of heterogeneous firms in monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003), to illustrate the different channels through which foreign employment can impact trade. In our framework, firms are heterogeneous in their productivity level and in their employment of foreign workers. Analyzing first-order selection effects, we show how foreign employment determines the choice of a firm to supply a foreign market, and how it allows that firm to produce larger quantities for each foreign market it supplies.4«1 Model set-upConsider a world with n +1 symm。