Highlights :

 Abstract :
An Indirect Exporter is defined as a firm that sells its product to a trade intermediary in its own country, who then goes on to export the good. Despite the numerous appearances of these firms in recent theoretical models, there has been no empirical work comparing these firms to Domestic firms and “Direct Exporters". Using a firm-level data set for Eastern Europe, I show that these firms do, as predicted in the theoretical literature, lie between Domestic firms and Direct Exporters for a range of measures of firm performance. The advantage enjoyed by Direct Exporters is the most robust finding, while the ambiguity surrounding the productivity gap between Indirect Exporters and Domestic firms indicates that these two categories of firm may be close to identical.

 Keywords : Exports | Productivity | Trade intermediation | Indirect exporters

 JEL : F10, F14