Download or read book Three Essays on Firms in International Trade written by Johannes Schwarzer and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the nature of international trade changes, this thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of modern international trade and policy for firms and employment. It consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 investigates the effect of the Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA) of 2002 between Switzerland and the European Union (EU) on the extensive margin of Swiss exports and thereby contributes to the literature on impact analysis of non-tariff measures. Embedding the theoretical setup in the heterogeneous firms in international trade literature, we model the MRA as a reduction in fixed exporting costs for firms in affected sectors exporting to the EU market, yielding predicted increases on the extensive margin of bilateral trade with the EU in those sectors. Using a double and triple difference approach, we find that the reduction of fixed costs induced by the MRA has entailed a relative diversification of Swiss exports of affected products into the EU. Chapter 2 revisits the "self-selection vs. learning-by-exporting (LBE)" debate with new evidence on a large panel of German firms and sheds new light on the channels that foster export-induced productivity gains. In line with previous results, we find substantial pre-export differences in productivity between future exporters and domestic firms. Nevertheless, these pre-export differences remain constant over time and we find strong evidence against a conscious self-selection effect, in which firms would actively engage in increasing their productivity in temporal proximity to starting to export. In contrast, we find support for the LBE hypothesis in both the manufacturing and the services sector, notably among continuing exporters. However, the learning effect is not progressive and more short-lived in the latter than in the former. We explain the different sectoral performances with significant differences in access to foreign markets, which is substantially lower and more c.