演講者簡介 : Professor Minyoung Song received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland in 2025. She is currently a Research Associate Fellow at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. Her research interests are Macroeconomics, International Trade, and Economic Growth.
演講摘要 : Multinational firms account for a large share of global trade and production and have a significant impact on productivity growth across countries. We develop a tractable model of international trade and multinational production (MP) to analyze their effects on productivity growth through knowledge diffusion across countries. We find that increases in bilateral trade costs shift firm activity away from exporting to producing abroad, leading to productivity increases in the multinational’s production destination at the expense of the exporting nation. We connect the theory to evidence by examining the impact of a 2004–2006 Chinese liberalization of outward investment on the productivity growth of its counterparts. Using an instrumental variable approach, we find a 1 percentage point increase in MP share from China resulted in a 1.83% increase in productivity. Mapping the reduced-form estimates to the rate of idea diffusion from foreign firms, we provide evidence on key parameters used in knowledge diffusion models. While long-run productivity growth is primarily driven by domestic firms due to its larger knowledge diffusion intensity, MP can have a sizable impact on productivity growth, particularly when productivity differences between multinational and domestic firms are large. Through counterfactual analysis, we quantify the impacts of Chinese liberalization of trade, as well as inward and outward MP, on the productivity growth of 59 countries.
