한국생산성학회

This paper empirically examines the effects of innovation activities and firm size on export shares for Korea's listed and registered manufacturing companies using financial data over the period 2000-2016. In estimating quantile regression models for export performance, it controls for sample selection problem caused by distributional heterogeneity of exports by employing the quantile estimation procedure. Empirical results confirm that for all firms, export shares are positively associated with innovation actvities on average, implying that the larger the R&D investment is, the higher the export share is. However, quantile regression results show very different form those of traditional regression methods. The export effects of innovation activities are the largest at 50 percent quantile in the conditional distribution of exporting; the largest at the lower end of the export distribution for the small and medium sized firms, but at the higher end for the large firms. This implies that government R&D subsidy would have a stronger effect on exports at the lower quantile of the distribution for small and medium sized firms. This confirms that R&D investment should be a highly significant factor for enhancement of competitiveness in exporting markets and essential sources of economic growth. Second, estimated results show that firm size can have positive effect on export, but they can not support the hypothesis of inverse U-shaped relationship between firm size and export. The quantile regression results show that firm size effects should have no significant patterns for small and medium sized firms but should have the U-shaped pattern for large firms.