This paper conducts empirical analysis on productivity difference among
groups of firms that perform different globalization strategies such as exports
and foreign direct investments. Using data on the Survey of Business Structure
and Activities provided by the Statistics Korea, we set up three groups of firms
(domestic firms, exporting firms, and foreign direct investment firms) and use
Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests to examine if there is any productivity differential
among those groups. Our results show that the level of productivity of
exporting firms is higher than that of domestic firms; and the productivity of
foreign direct investment firms is even higher than that of the exporters. The
results of the productivity ordering are robust to various considerations such as
capital intensity, R&D intensity, presence of parent firms, and continuation of
the same globalization strategy. The contribution of the paper to the literature
is the first empirical study showing that the globalization strategy of Korean
firms is determined by firm-specific factors using firm-level dataset.