贸易自由化与企业内的产品质量调整

多产品出口企业是中国出口贸易的重要组成部分。在贸易自由化冲击下,该类企业如何调整其核心产品与非核心产品的生产,对于提升企业乃至整体产业的国际竞争力具有重要意义。本文在异质性企业模型基础上内生化产品质量构建理论模型,并使用中国工业企业数据和中国海关数据对模型进行实证检验。研究发现,中间产品进口关税的下降会促使多产品企业对出口产品的质量进行升级,从而提高出口产品定价,且企业的非核心产品质量提升的幅度相对更高,出口价格上升的幅度也更大,即中间品贸易自由化可以缩小多产品企业内的非核心产品和核心产品的质量和价格差距,从而优化企业内的资源配置。异质性分析发现,对于异质性商品而言,关税下降使企业出口产品质量和出口产品价格变化更大,而同质性产品的质量和价格变化则不明显。本文进行了一系列稳健性检验,结果均支持本文的基本结论。

Trade Liberalization and Products Quality Adjustment within Firms

Multi-product exporters make up the bulk of Chinese export trade.How do such firms strategically reallocate resources between core and non-core products in response to trade liberalization?This paper constructs a theoretical model in which heterogeneous firm has endogenous product quality.Using data of China Industrial Enterprise Database and Customs Database,this paper empirically finds that the decline in tariffs on imported intermediate goods induces multi-product exporters to upgrade the quality of their products and thus raises the export price.Besides,the effect on firms’non-core product quality upgrade is relatively stronger,thus the export price goes up more.Therefore,trade liberalization in intermediate goods optimizes resource allocation within exporting firms by narrowing the quality and price gap between their non-core and core products.The heterogeneity analyses further prove that these quality and price effects are more pronounced by heterogeneous goods production rather than homogeneous goods production.Finally,this paper conducts a series of robustness checks,and the main findings still hold.