Productivity Of Chinese Firms Research Articles

Firm-level productivity and stock return: New evidence from China

This study provides novel insights into the stock return predictability related to the firm-level total factor productivity (TFP) in the China's stock market, covering the period from 1999 to 2020. Contrary to studies on other countries, our research identifies a positive correlation between the productivity of Chinese firms and their future stock returns. We suggest that this correlation is driven by mispricing rather than risk premium. Specifically, we argue that investors' difficulties in accurately assessing firm-level productivity and limited attention result in the inadequate incorporation of this information into stock prices. Furthermore, our analysis explores additional factors contributing to the observed productivity-related market anomaly, including investor overconfidence, positive feedback trading, lottery preference, information uncertainty, and limits to arbitrage, indicating investors' irrationality and behavioral biases. Importantly, our study also demonstrates that firm-level productivity serves as a reliable predictor of a firm's future profitability.

Does university-industry collaboration improve firm productivity? Evidence from China.

China's high-quality development cannot be achieved without high-quality research. As the university is an indispensable source of advanced research, analyzing the impact of university-industry collaboration (UIC) on firm performance helps us understand the significance of universities for China's economic development and innovation activities. As existing research does not pay attention to the impact of UIC on the productivity of Chinese firms, we examine the impact of such collaboration on firm productivity using natural language processing and by matching China's intellectual property and listed firms' operations databases. The empirical results show that UIC can promote firm productivity by improving the quality of their innovations, strengthening internalization efficiency, and broadening their research horizons. Moreover, the UIC process has a pronounced effect on promoting firm productivity in technology- and intellectual property-intensive industries. From the UIC perspective, we interpret China's economic development and provide new insights for developing countries regarding using universities to alleviate the insufficiency of private R&D investments.

Clustering Effects on Firm R&D, Exporting and Productivity in China

This paper examines the effects of regional clustering on the linkages among R&D, exporting and productivity of Chinese firms. A structural framework is employed using a set of recursive equations that is capable of correcting for most estimation issues related to selection and endogeneity. The main findings reveal that regional clustering brings about relatively trivial direct benefits to exporters after taking into account important sources of firm heterogeneity. Rather, the main benefits of clustering on exporting appear to arise indirectly through investments in innovation and productivity. The main implication of the findings suggests that a better endowed geographical area improves international competitiveness mainly by enhancing the super-additive effects of investments in technology on productivity, which in turn, enhances exporting performance.

Clustering effects on firm exporting with productivity‐enhancing R&D in China

AbstractThis paper examines the effects of regional clustering on the linkages among R&D, exporting and productivity of Chinese firms. A structural framework is employed using a set of recursive equations that is capable of correcting for most estimation issues related to selection and endogeneity. The main findings reveal that regional clustering brings about relatively trivial direct benefits to exporters after taking into account important sources of firm heterogeneity. Rather, the main benefits of clustering on exporting appear to arise indirectly through investments in innovation and productivity. The main implication of the findings suggests that a better endowed geographical area improves international competitiveness mainly by enhancing the super‐additive effects of investments in technology on productivity, which, in turn, enhances exporting performance.

Agglomeration economies in creative industries

This paper examines agglomeration effects on the productivity of Chinese firms in the creative industries between 2012 and 2014. We estimate productivity with a production function approach, and test whether three measures of agglomeration—namely, specialization, diversity, and density—affect the productivity of firms in creative industries. According to our results, that the density elasticity of productivity is 0.31, which suggests that agglomeration economies matter for creative industries. Urbanization economies resulting from diversity in service industries are the main source of agglomeration economies, but there is no specialization effect after controlling for firm size, ownership, and industry concentration. Further, availability of communication, represented by digital access and transportation convenience, boosts knowledge spillovers and thus enhances urbanization economies. Our findings are robust to alternative specifications, outcome and agglomeration measures, and treatment of outliers.

Identifying the Sources of Agglomeration Benefits within China's Economic and Development Zones

This paper examines the ability of place-based policies in China to foster agglomeration economies via Marshallian-based externalities that are expected to arise due to the reduction in transports costs associated with supplier-buyer linkages, labor pooling and knowledge spillovers. Empirically, I measure and quantify the relative contribution of each Marshallian source to the productivity of Chinese firms located in areas with and without economic and development zones (EDZs). I deal with the identification problem by exploiting temporal variations in the designation of EDZs, and matching techniques combined with a differencein- differences estimation approach. The results show that EDZ policy improves firm performance by fostering externalities that arise from each Marshallian channel, especially customer-buyer linkages. Moreover, EDZs that are designed to promote global-local linkages are more successful at moderating these agglomeration forces compared to those designed to promote domestic high-tech industries.

Market liberalization and firm performance during China's economic transition

This paper examines the impact of market liberalization on firm performance through institutional changes during the economic reform in China. The conceptualization focuses on the decentralization of control, ownership restructuring, and industrial policy as the primary institutional changes to implement market liberalization in China. These institutional changes affect firm performance by shaping managerial incentives, affecting transaction and agency costs, and making selective resource allocations across and within industries. Using a large-scale data set including 23,577 firms between 1992 and 1996, the study examines how market liberalization affects the profitability and productivity of Chinese firms and the relationship between ownership change and the performance of state-owned enterprises.

A study of the R&D efficiency and productivity of Chinese firms

This paper investigates the influence of ownership on the research and development (R&D) efficiency of Chinese firms. In a sample of 8341 Chinese industrial firms, ownership is found to be a contributing factor in the cross-sectional variance of both R&D and productive efficiencies. The state sector has significantly lower R&D and productive efficiency than the non-state sector. Within the non-state sector, foreign firms have higher R&D and productive efficiency than domestic collective-owned enterprises and joint stock companies. The higher R&D efficiency of foreign firms appears to be due to a higher R&D intensity, which in turn leads to higher productivity.

Growth, Efficiency, and Convergence in China's State and Collective Industry

In China, as in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, economic reform initiatives seek to increase productivity by introducing elements of market-oriented policies and institutions into an economy formerly dominated by state planning. Efforts to evaluate the impact of reform of Chinese industry have focused on the measurement of productivity change in state enterprises. This study expands the prior framework of analysis in several directions. Our investigation of productivity trends is not limited to state enterprises but includes quantitative comparisons with China's fast-growing collective industries, which contributed 36% of overall industrial output in 1988.1 Unlike previous studies, our analysis works with gross rather than net output. This permits us to investigate changes in the productivity of intermediate inputs, which occupy a large portion of total costs in Chinese industry, as well as labor and capital. To do this, we develop a "quasi-frontier" estimation procedure which seems appropriate for comparisons of total factor productivity based on Chinese industrial data. Finally, we offer a quantitative perspective on the extent to which reform efforts have moved industrial resource allocation toward patterns expected of a market system. The analysis confirms our previous finding, based on a restricted framework employing only labor, fixed capital, and net output, that multifactor productivity in state industry has risen substantially during