Quid Pro Quo, Knowledge Spillover, and Industrial Quality Upgrades: Evidence from the Chinese Auto Industry

时间：2023年11月2日上午9:00

地点：腾讯会议184-699-330

主讲人：白洁，哈佛大学肯尼迪学院助理教授

主持人：殷戈，对外经济贸易大学国际经济研究院助理研究员

题目：Quid Pro Quo, Knowledge Spillover, and Industrial Quality Upgrades: Evidence from the Chinese Auto Industry

工作语言：英语

主讲人简介：

Jie Bai is an assistant professor in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She received Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 2016, and spent one year at Microsoft Research New England prior to joining HKS in 2017. Jie’s research focuses on firms and markets in developing countries and emerging economies, addressing two broad questions: First, what are the key barriers and constraints that hinder firm growth and upgrading in developing countries? Second, understanding these, how can we then structure effective policies to alleviate firm-level constraints and market frictions to facilitate private sector development? Methodologically, she combines large-scale randomized control trials, quasi-experimental applied micro techniques, and structural modeling tools from industrial organization and international trade. Jie also likes to ground her empirical research in microeconomic theory to shed light on how firms make decision, and how markets are organized to generate incentives and allocate resources.

讲座摘要：

This paper studies the impact of FDI via quid pro quo (technology for market access) in facilitating knowledge spillover and quality upgrades. Our context is the Chinese automobile industry, where foreign automakers are required to set up joint ventures (the quid) with domestic automakers in return for market access (the quo). The identification strategy exploits a unique dataset of detailed vehicle quality measures along multiple dimensions and relies on within-product quality variation across dimensions. We show that affiliated domestic automakers, compared to their nonaffiliated counterparts, adopt more similar quality strengths of their joint venture partners. Quid pro quo generates knowledge spillover to affiliated domestic automakers in addition to any industry-wide spillover. We rule out alternative explanations involving endogenous joint venture network formation, overlapping customer bases, or direct technology transfer via market transactions. Analyses leveraging additional micro datasets on worker flows and upstream suppliers demonstrate that labor mobility and supplier networks are important channels mediating knowledge spillover. Finally, we estimate an equilibrium model for the auto industry and quantify the impact of quid-pro-quo-induced quality upgrading on domestic sales and profits. Quid pro quo improved the quality of affiliated domestic models by 3.8-12.7% and raised their sales (profit) by 0.9-3.9% (1.02-3.49%) between 2007 and 2014 relative to unrestricted FDI.