This thesis examines three aspects of globalized production. The first chapter contributes to the literature on exporting firms by showing how the picture changes when we take into account also firms that participate in exporting indirectly by providing inputs into the export production. Like exporters, these firms perform better than the rest of the economy and there is hierarchy within the exports supply chain whereby firm performance increases with the foreign demand exposure. The second chapter finds evidence that international production linkages foster innovative capacity by inducing more knowledge spillovers, but only between countries that are connected through both forward and backward linkages. When such connections are strong, a dollar spent on research and development abroad is a third as powerful in generating domestic innovation as a dollar spent at home. The third chapter investigates the impact of trade agreements on bilateral trade flows of manufactured goods in the context of global value chains (GVCs). It shows that free trade agreements increase participation of developing countries at low value added stages of GVCs while deeper integration increases their participation at more upstream stages where they contribute more domestic value added into the supply chain. Furthermore, an analysis based on the content of trade agreements reveals that their average impact is due to those that liberalise trade in services while agreements with investment provisions have an impact similar to deep integration agreements.