Exporting and Plant-Level Efficiency Gains: It’s in the Measure

While there is strong evidence that more productive plants select into exporting, the literature has struggled to identify export-related efficiency gains within plants. We show that this is due to the common use of revenue-based productivity measures (TFPR): more efficient producers tend to charge lower prices, leading to a downward bias in TFPR. Using census panels of Chilean, Colombian, and Mexican manufacturing plants, we find sizable...