[12月9日]国际经济学Workshop

发布日期：2014-12-09 02:25 来源：北京大学国家发展研究院

Seminar on International Economics (12.9)

时间：2014年12月9日（周二）10:30-12:00

地点：北京大学国家发展研究院/中国经济研究中心512会议室

主持：余淼杰

主讲：張軼凡，Lingnan University

主题：Cross-Country Diffusion of Culture through FDI: A Firm-Level Analysis of Gender Inequality in China

摘要：This paper studies how foreign direct investment (FDI) contributes to cultural convergence across countries. Specifically, we focus on whether multinational firms transfer corporate culture of hiring women to foreign affiliates and eventually to other local firms in the host country. To guide our empirical analysis, we build a parsimonious multi-sector task-based model that features heterogeneity in firms productivity and their biases towards female workers. Workers are differentiated by gender, with women having a comparative advantage in skill-intensive versus brawn-intensive tasks, and sectors differing in their dependence on these tasks. Discrimination lowers profits. Increased prevalence of foreign firms induce discriminating firms to increase female employment, due to both competition and imitation. Using a large manufacturing firm data set from China over the 2004-2007 period, we find that foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) from countries with lower gender inequality tend to hire proportionately more women and are more likely to appoint female managers. In addition to the within-firm cultural transfer, we find evidence of cultural spillover from FIEs to local firms. Such effects are stronger in sectors in which females have a comparative advantage, for the less productive firms, and from FIEs whose home countries are less biased against women. These results support our model predictions and show that FDI lowers gender inequality through channels beyond the competition effect proposed by Becker (1957). Our results highlight an unexplored externalities of FDI, in addition to technology and managerial spillover as emphasized by existing studies.

演讲者简介：張軼凡，香港岭南大学经济系副教授，博士毕业于美国匹兹堡大学。研究领域为中国经济、国际经济学和产业组织理论。目前已在Journal of International Economics， Journal of Development Economics，Journal of Comparative Economics, Review of International Economics，Pacific Economic Review，China Economic Review等国际知名期刊上发表多篇文章。

FDI and Culture.pdf