This paper draws on employer-employee data from the Mexican social security agency to investigate the relationship between exporting and wage premia at the plant level. Following Verhoogen (2004), we show that the peso crisis of late 1994 generated a differential inducement to export within manufacturing industries, with initially larger and more productive plants increasing exports relative to initially smaller and less productive plants, and that average wages at the plant level followed the same pattern. We then use the longitudinal information on individual workers to decompose the average wage changes into changes in the skill composition of the workforce and changes in plant-year effects, which we interpret as measures of wage premia. We compare the results for manufacturing during the peso crisis period (1993-1997) to results for a later period during which there was no devaluation (1997-2001) and to results for non-tradable sectors in both periods. We show that two-thirds or more of the difference in differential changes in average wages in manufacturing between the two periods can be attributed to changes in wage premia. There were no such changes in wage premia in non-tradable sectors. These results provide strong support for the argument that the differential inducement to export generated by the peso crisis led plants to increase individual wage premia, and are consistent with the hypothesis that exporting requires upgrading product quality, which in turn requires raising wage premia.