【主讲】Luhang Wang 助教授 (厦门大学)
【主题】Sell Deep? Sell Wide? Or Both? Perceived Quality and Product Scope of Chinese Exporters of Electrical Products
【时间】2014年11月18日 (周二) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼801室
【语言】英文
【摘要】There is a surging trade literature on multi-product exporters who account for a disproportion- ally large share of total exports. On the other side, it is also well known that new exporters usually start small and many with a single product. In this paper, I bring the two bodies of literature, one on multi-product exporters and one on the post-entry dynamics, together to study how single-product exporters evolve into multi-product exporters, with special attention to the role of perceived quality in this process. I use the detailed price and quantity informa- tion on firms' exports between 2000 and 2006 from China's customs data to recover the latent quality as residuals from market- and product-specific demand functions for China's exports. A cross-sectional comparison reveals that relative to a single-product exporter, a multi-product exporter has quality premium in its core products, but quality discount in its peripheral prod- ucts. But overtime within a firm-destination-product cell, the perceived quality is positively correlated with an exporter's product scope, which I argue is mainly driven by the addition of new product lines at the exact time when the existing products get well accepted by the market. A trade model of heterogeneous firms self-selecting into exporting markets with an once-and-for-all draw of firm- or firm- and product-specific productivity that is abstract away from the process of learning and gradual resolution of uncertainty on the demand side cannot generate these patterns.
