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This paper estimates the effect of antidumping protection on the productivity of domestic import-competing firms. Two key results emerge. First, the productivity of the average firm receiving protection moderately improves, but this is never sufficient to close the productivity gap with firms never involved in antidumping cases. Second, allowing for firm heterogeneity reveals that domestic firms with relatively low initial productivity – laggard firms – have productivity gains during protection, while firms with high initial productivity – frontier firms – experience productivity losses during protection. These results are consistent with recent theories showing that trade policy affects firms differently depending on their initial productivity.

The effects of trade liberalization on productivity have been widely reported in the literature.2 But while tariffs on industrial goods have never been lower, their decrease has gone hand-in-hand with a strong increase in newer types of trade protection. In particular, the use of antidumping protection has risen sharply in the last decade. Antidumping protection is supposed to keep “unfair imports” out, but there is a strong suspicion that it is often aimed at fostering the interests of inefficient domestic producers.3 Therefore, an important question is how antidumping import protection affects the productivity of domestic import-competing firms. For this purpose, we study European antidumping cases where protection is temporary and typically ends 5 years after the starting date.4

This paper empirically measures the effect of Antidumping (AD) protection on firm-level productivity of domestic import-competing firms. For this purpose we identified around 4800 European producers affected by AD cases. While we find the productivity of the average firm to be moderately improved during AD protection, productivity remains below that of firms never involved in AD cases. Therefore protection seems a very poor instrument to boost average firm-level productivity since it prevents resources to be freed up and to move to more productive sectors in the economy.