Quality Selection, Chinese Exports and Theories of Heterogeneous Firm Trade

Recent models of international trade have identified product quality as an important determinant of bilateral trade flows. Yet relatively little is understood about the relationship between the characteristics of the export market and the quality of products. In this paper we examine this link using Chinese data. We find evidence that product unit values vary with standard gravity variables in a different manner across sectors of the Chinese economy, and run contrary to earlier findings for the U.S. These results are not compatible with existing heterogeneous firm trade models such as Melitz (2003) model and its extension to include product quality by Baldwin and Harrigan (2007). To explain these differences we propose a heterogeneous firm trade model with quality differences and spatial price discrimination based on Melitz and Ottaviano (2007).product quality, heterogeneous firms, Chinese exports

Regional Heterogeneity and China’s International Trade: Sufficient Lumpiness or Not?

This paper explores whether there is sufficient lumpiness or heterogeneity in the relative endowments (capital, labour and skills) of the regions of China to affect China’s specialization and trade patterns. It does so using both the lens condition to identify the violation of factor price equalization across regions, and direct evidence on regional trade and specialization. The results are sensitive to the level of regional aggregation. The paper concludes, however, that China was sufficiently lumpy as recently as 2004 to affect it pattern of international trade.Trade, lumpiness, regions, China

The More the Better? Foreign Ownership and Corporate Performance in China

We examine the relationship between the degree of foreign ownership and performance of recipient firms, using of panel of 21,582 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005. We find that joint-ventures perform better than wholly foreign owned and purely domestic firms. Although productivity and profitability initially rise with foreign ownership, they start declining once foreign ownership reaches beyond 64%. This suggests that some domestic ownership is necessary to ensure optimal performance. We rationalize these findings with a model of a joint-venture, where strategic interactions between a foreign and a domestic owner’s inputs may lead to an inverse U-shaped ownership-performance relationship.Foreign ownership, corporate performance, China

Openness, Managerial Incentives and Heterogeneous Firms

Motivated by new evidence that managerial incentives play an important role in determining firm productivity, this paper incorporates the principal-agent mechanism into the new heterogeneous firm trade framework to examine the link between openness and endogenous firm productivity. We show that firm heterogeneity plays a crucial role in the effects of openness on firms’ optimal incentive contracts via the trade-induced “carrot and stick” effect. This mechanism increases the marginal value of managerial effort, which motivates the firm owners (principals) to offer a higher power contract to the managers (agents) to reduce managerial slacks. The intra-firm managerial incentive mechanism stressed in this paper could be viewed as complementary to the inter-firm reallocation effect in the Melitz (2003) model in explaining the observed link between openness and aggregate productivity.openness, managerial incentives, heterogeneous firms, productivity.

Quality selection, sectoral heterogeneity and Chinese exports

Recent models of international trade have identified product quality as an important determinant of bilateral trade flows. In this paper we examine the relationship between the characteristics of the export market and the aggregate quality of products using Chinese data. We find evidence that product unit values vary with standard gravity variables in a different manner across sectors of the Chinese economy, and run contrary to earlier findings for the U.S. These results are not compatible with existing heterogeneous firm trade models with constant mark-up such as Melitz (2003) model and its extension to include product quality by Baldwin and Harrigan (2011). We construct a heterogeneous firm trade model with quality differences as in Baldwin and Harrigan (2011) and spatial price discrimination based on Melitz and Ottaviano (2008), and show that the model provides plausible explanations for our empirical finds as well as other existing findings in the literature

What can explain the Chinese patent explosion?

We analyse the ‘explosion’ of patent filings by Chinese residents both domestically and in the United States during the early 2000s, employing a unique dataset of 374,000 firms matching patent applications to manufacturing census data. Our analysis reveals that patenting is highly concentrated among a small number of firms, operating in the information and communication technology sector. Although increases in patent filings by these companies are partly driven by increased R&D intensity, our analysis suggests that the explosion of patent filings at the Chinese patent office is driven by factors other than underlying innovative behavior, including government subsidies that encourage patent filings directly

Volatility and diversification of exports: firm level theory and evidence

We show using detailed firm-level Chinese data that, among small exporters, firms selling to a more diversified set of countries have more volatile exports, while the opposite holds among large exporters. This apriori surprising result for small firms is robust to a wide array of specifications and controls. Our theoretical explanation for these observations rests on the presence of fixed costs of exports per destination and short run demand shocks. In this setup , the volatility of a firm's exports depends not only on the diversification of its destination portfolio but also on whether it exports permanently to all markets. Among all exporters, a more diversified pool of destinations makes the firm more likely to export occasionally to some markets, thereby raising export volatility