Firm Export Heterogeneity and International Productivity Gap: Evidence from France and Japan ∗

Do exporters in one country outperform exporters from another country? Similarly, do non-exporters in one country outperform non-exporters from another country? In spite of the growing number of studies on firm export heterogeneity, none of them addressed these questions because they focused on the productivity differentials between firms from a single country. This paper attempts to fill this gap using firm-level data for France and Japan from 1994 to 2006. It compares the productivity distributions of French and Japanese firms for each of the manufacturing industries using an industry-specific representative firm common to both French and Japanese firms. Our main result is that Japanese exporters tend to outperform their French counterparts in the following sense: their productivity advantage is larger than average in industries in which Japan has a productivity lead, while their productivity disadvantage is smaller than average in industries in which France has the productivity lead. This result is consistent with recent models of international trade and heterogenous firms which assume that fixed export costs differ across countries.