Investigating the intra-product relationship within multi-product firms is of great practical sig-nificance for cultivating the core competence of firms.Based on highly-disaggregated Chinese Customs data,we employ product-market-specific demand as an exogenous instrumental variable to empirically examine whether the core and non-core products are interconnected within firms.We find that the exports of non-core products increase with the export of the core.The same complementarity is also found when investigating the export effect of non-core products on the core.Hence,this paper proves the systematic within-firm two-way complementarity between products.Mechanism analysis suggests that the effect can be attributed to price de-creasing,quantity increasing,and quality enhancement of non-core products.The expansion of firm scale and product scope will weaken the effect.These findings provide political guidance for cultivating new competitive advantages of Chinese enterprises and promoting high-quality development of foreign trade.
维普
万方数据