期刊名称：Euro Area Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Statistics
印刷版ISSN：1830-3420
电子版ISSN：1830-3439
出版年度：2014
出版社：European Central Bank
摘要：Policy-making institutions such as the European Commission, the ECB and the OECD often use unitlabor costs as a measure of international competitiveness. The goal of this paper is to examine how wellthis measure is related to international export performance at the firm level. To this end, we use Belgianfirm-level data for the period 1999-2010 to analyze the impact of unit labor costs on exports. We use exportsadjusted for their import content. We find a statistically significant negative effect of unit labor costs onexport performance of firms with an estimated elasticity of the intensive margin of exports ranging between-0.2 and -0.4. This result is robust to various specifications, including firm, time and sector fixed effectsand estimation approaches. We find that this elasticity varies between sectors and between firms, with firmsthat are more labor-intensive having a higher elasticity of exports with respect to unit labor costs. The microdata also enable us to analyze the impact of unit labor costs on the extensive margin. Our results show thathigher unit labor costs reduce the probability of starting to export for non-exporters and increase theprobability of exporters stopping. While our results show that unit labor costs have an impact on theintensive margin and extensive margin of firm-level exports, the effect is rather low, suggesting that passthroughof costs into prices is limited or that demand for exported products is not elastic. The latter isconsistent with recent trade models emphasizing that not only relative costs, but also demand factors suchas quality and taste matter for explaining firm-level exports
