Engagement in Asymmetric Markets: Causes and Consequences

This paper contributes to the emprical debate on firm heterogeneity in international trade dealing with the direction of causality from which the performance premium across destination markets originates. For this purpose, we first investigate the selection of firms into markets with asymmetric income levels exploring which firm level characteristics are associated with this selection. Once we identify movements along different statuses on a year to year basis we investigate the factors that drive these movements. We search for the heterogeneity in post-entry effects of trading with different type of markets by establishing treatment models in line with the learning by exporting hypothesis. Our results indicate self-selection mechanisms and post-entry effects differ from market to market for Turkish manufacturing firms.