Indian Buyers in Global Markets: Quality, Prices, and Productivity

Abstract

We examine import prices paid by direct-sourcing Indian manufacturing firms in the early 2000s using a unique data set that matches firm characteristics with product and source-country trade data, offering a theoretical and empirical extension of Halpern and Koren (2007). We find that import prices are positively associated with firm productivity, distance from source-country, and source-country GDP per capita, and negatively associated with source-country remoteness, an effect we attribute to the higher scope for quality differentiation in less remote locations. Further, we find that source-country characteristics matter more, and cost factors less, for differentiated than for non-differentiated goods.

Keywords: Importers, Firm-level data, Pricing, Input quality, productivity, India

JEL Classification: F1, F10, F12, F14