It illustrates that if immigrants in low‐skilled occupations (a) do not transmit relevant information on foreign markets to their employers but (b) do enhance firms' productivity (as emphasized in the literature), then their effect on exports should not be destination‐specific. Overall, this set of results corroborates the hypothesis that immigrant workers have a positive impact on exports that is spread across all destinations and is therefore not only destination‐specific. First, using the distribution of immigrant workers allows us to focus on the working population, that is, to reduce—as much as possible—the effect of spillovers on firms that could arise from the nonworking immigrant population located in the region of the firm. We find that foreign-born workers, and especially skilled individuals, foster exports at both margins. After removing obvious outliers and extreme values, the mean characteristics of the DADS dataset are in line with aggregate evidence. We provide three robustness tests in the Online Appendix. At the intensive margin, an increase in the employment of immigrant workers is associated with higher export outcomes. In Section 4, we present results in support of the export‐enhancing effect of immigrant workers in both low‐ and high‐skilled occupations. We revisit two strands of literature. It is however not significant for the participation dummy. [The copyright line for this article was changed on 17 December 2019 after original online publication.]. This last exercise hence confirms the presence of a multi‐destination effect of immigrant workers. We report the results in Table A26. The theoretical predictions of the model are reported in Table 8 and detailed in the Online Appendix. In contrast to census data, the DADS data exhaustively covers the employment of immigrants in France.

For this exercise, we keep only firms that export each year of the sample period. Firms are thus heterogeneous in size, which generates heterogeneity in productivity. On the one hand, empirical evidence shows that the export‐enhancing effect of immigrants is related to the information they convey on foreign countries (Andrews, Schank, & Upward, 2017; Hatzigeorgiou & Lodefalk, 2016; Parrotta, Pozzoli, & Sala, 2016; Hiller, 2013; Peri & Requena‐Silvente, 2010). We start by checking whether our results are robust to alternative specification choices. 83 likes. As explained by Emsley et al.

The main sector is made of manufactures of machinery, equipment and other products in metal. On the contrary, firms employing immigrants in low‐skilled occupations export on average 24.25 times less than control firms (column 1).