firms exporting to high-income countries—a dummy that takes a value of one when a firm exports to a country at the top 25% of the per capita GDP spectrum. As it can be seen, the results are qualitatively similar as before. Exporting is associated with higher skilled employment and in particular higher utilization of engineers, and there is an additional effect on the demand of skills and of skilled tasks for firms that export to high-income, rich countries.

These results suggests that both the quality and the required services mechanisms are present in the Chilean case. The presence of the quality mechanism is consistent with the widespread support for it listed above. The presence of the required services mechanism is also expected. Pellandra (2017), for instance, finds support for the Matsuyama interpretation using similar Chilean data. Building on Brambilla, Lederman and Porto (2012), Pellandra includes fixed costs of reaching different export destinations and those fixed costs are essentially covered with skilled workers. This suggests that the required services mechanism is also present. Incidentally, this is consistent with the results in Brambilla, Lederman, and Porto (2012), who also find support for both mechanisms using Argentine data.

The most novel result of this paper is, however, the finding that exporting requires the skills of specific tasks within skilled labor, namely those performed by engineers rather than by directors or administrative workers. The quality provision and quality valuation mechanisms just discussed can rationalize these findings by assuming for example a technology to produce quality that is more intensive in those specific skilled tasks. In the working paper version of this paper (Brambilla, Lederman, and Porto 2016), we develop a model with some of these features. We combine elements from the literature on quality and skilled utilization with element from theories of trade and tasks. In particular, we build on recent models of international trade where goods are produced with tasks using assignment rules (Acemoglu and Autor 2011; Costinot and Vogel 2010). Production involves many different tasks, such as managing, accounting, clerical activities, design, packaging, logistics, sales representation, operational production, input control, monitoring, supervision, services. Tasks are executed by workers with different skills, some tasks are skill-intensive, while others are unskilled-intensive. Firms produce goods of varying quality and exporters tend to produce higher quality goods. In turn, the production of quality is intensive in skilled tasks relative to the production of physical output. Firms are heterogeneous and differ in the efficiency of factor use: some firms are more productive in skill-intensive tasks than others. More productive firms become exporters and hire more skilled workers overall. The demand for skilled workers will, however, be biased towards those skilled tasks required to produce exportable higher-quality goods.

A different strand of literature that is related to our results on tasks builds on the organizational structure of firms and their export orientation. Lileeva and Trefler (2010) argue that export opportunities induce firms to reorganize and adopt better technologies, thus becoming more productive. Caliendo and Rossi-Hansberg (2012) develop a theory of firms that choose layers of employees to organize production in the most efficient, less costly way. In this theory, the bottom layer (blue-collar workers) produces output while consecutive upper layers (supervisors, management) solve problems associated with production. Adding a layer of “problem solving” reduces the marginal cost of production but incurs a fixed cost. Consequently, a demand shock (such as an export shock in our empirical analysis) may 10