Heiwai Tang
What effect does international trade have on a company’s product scope and organisational structure? Why do some firms concentrate on core competencies while others expand their product range? How does product specialisation impact a company’s hierarchy and span of control? These are some of the questions Heiwai Tang is currently examining together with three other international scholars.
While visiting CESifo, Mr Tang will also explore the relationship between international and intra-national trade in China. His goal is to portray the patterns and dynamics of the domestic segment of global supply chains in China using input-output tables and firm-level data. China is an interesting case for this question not only because of its stellar export growth in the past decades but also due to the dominance of state-owned enterprises in upstream sectors. The project will analyse how past reforms and the recent surge of state-owned enterprises shape the downstream private-sector exports in China through the domestic input-output linkages.
Mr Tang’s research interests span a wide range of theoretical and empirical topics related to international trade. His recent papers have studied how a country’s labour market institutions shape its comparative advantage and thus trade patterns; how foreign buyers’ control over imported inputs can affect the organisational structure of international trade; whether trade intermediaries can serve as quality assurers in international trade; what accounts for the rising domestic value added in Chinese exports since 2000; and why and how Chinese firms become more labour-intensive after they start exporting. His work has been published in the Journal of International Economics, Journal of Development Economics, CESifo Economic Studies and World Economy.
Heiwai Tang received his PhD in economics from MIT in 2008. He is currently assistant professor of economics at Tufts University in Boston; as of June 2013 he will become assistant professor at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C. Mr Tang is a research fellow at the Centro Studi Luca d’Agliano at the University of Milan and has been a visiting researcher at the World Bank, the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Center of Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. He was an assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Business School.