What's behind the figures? Quantifying the Cross-Country Exporter Productivity gap

We present a simple framework that allows us to examine the cross-country exporter productivity gap without accessing confidential firm-level data. This gap depends on the three readily available statistics: the productivity gap between two countries; the export participation rates; and export premia. This gap holds irrespective of the data generating process and independent of sunk costs of entering domestic markets. Under specific conditions, allocative efficiency may affect the exporter productivity gap. Additional assumptions on the log-normality of the productivity distribution of firms allow one to recover the export threshold and heterogeneity parameters. The empirical analysis globally validates this exercise.