讲座主题：Foreign Direct Investment and Product Quality in Host Economies: The Role of Worker Mobility

主讲人：澳大利亚詹姆斯库克大学 孙思忠副教授

主持人：茹玉骢教授

时间：2018年10月25日（周四）13：30-15：30

地点：36365线路检测中心（6号楼）210

主办单位：浙江省一流学科“应用经济学”国际贸易学方向、36365线路检测中心

主讲人简介：

孙思忠，澳大利亚詹姆斯库克大学副教授，暨南大学讲座教授，澳大利亚国立大学经济学博士学位，澳大利亚中澳经济学会（CESA）主席。主要研究领域包括实证国际贸易、实证产业组织、发展经济学、外商直接投资、中国经济、应用计量经济学、能源经济学、公司金融，目前已经在国际期刊上发表将近40篇学术论文，其中包括应用经济学(Applied Economics)、经济建模(Economic Modeling)、公司金融(Journal of Corporate Finance)和产业组织评论(Review of Industrial Organization)。孙思忠博士同时也为多个学术杂志匿名审稿人。

内容摘要：

This paper examines, both theoretically and empirically, how the presence of foreign direct investment (FDI) affects product quality of domestic firms through worker mobility. Melitz (2003) type heterogeneous firms are faced with a monopolistically competitive product market and labour markets of production workers and quality control personnel. We show that the probability that an FDI-trained worker will move from a foreign-invested firm to a domestic firm in the host economy is strictly positive. Mobility of more productive workers from foreign-invested to domestic firms lowers the cost of production and contributes to improvement in the quality of goods produced by domestic firms. Profit maximization by firms yields a structural relationship between unobserved product quality and observed revenue, which allows us to identify the impact of FDI on product quality. We use the theoretical model to frame empirical estimation, where we propose a novel approach to correct for sample selection bias. Under some mild assumptions, a set of population moments are derived and estimated using firm level data from China’s beverage manufacturing industry. We find that, on average, (i) working for foreign-invested firms boosts the skill level of workers by 11.2 per cent and (ii) the probability that an FDI-trained worker will move to a domestic firm is approximately 0.3. Estimation of the structural parameters shows that a one per cent increase in FDI leads to approximately 1.4 per cent improvement in product quality of domestic firms in China’s beverage manufacturing industry.