题目： Made in China; Created in China: Super Processors and Two-way Heterogeneity

演讲人： Yuan Zi, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Oslo

时间：2019年 1 月 3 日（周四）  14:30-16:00

地点：上海财经大学中欧平台武东校区114室

摘要：

The existing literature on China has traditionally identified processing exporters as inferior in terms of productivity and engagement in R&D. In this paper, we show that processing exporters are often as good as other exporters, and that there exists a special breed of firms that are active in both ordinary and processing exports. These mixed firms are superior to other firms in multiple dimensions, and are instrumental in driving China's export boom in 2000-2006. Importantly, being mixed is not due to selling multiple products or exporting to multiple destinations; using a unique transaction-level data on Chinese exports with brand information, we find that processing and ordinary transactions differ in terms of brand-ownership, suggesting that processing firms are more specialized in supplying tasks to other firms with established brands. To explain these stylized facts, we build on Antras et al. (2017) and Bernard et al. (2017) to develop a model of firms that are heterogeneous in their branding and manufacturing ability. In this model, firms optimize their production and sourcing behavior, and this generates the ranking among different types of firms that we observe in the data. The model produces an endogenous mass of suppliers, the increase of which reduces the marginal cost of production for all brands. The model provides a natural explanation for China’s processing-export promoting policy, which we evaluate by focusing on China's adoption of online supervision for processing transactions between 2000-2006. We find that promoting processing trade leads to entry and intra-industry reallocations not only for processing firms but also for ordinary firms, ultimately increasing aggregate productivity.

演讲人简介：

Yuan Zi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Oslo. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute, Geneva and was a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Economics at the MIT. Her research interests are international trade and development, and her work has been published in leading academic journals, such as Journal of International Economics and Journal of Economic Geography.