Do Industrial Robots Improve Export Product Quality of Multi-Product Enterprises? Evidence in China

ABSTRACT

Based on an endogenous quality selection model, we investigate the effect of industrial robots on the export product quality of China’s multi-product enterprises. The main finding is that there is a nonlinear “inverted U-shaped” relationship between industrial robot applications and export quality. Industrial robots mainly affect export quality through the “productivity improvement effect” and “innovation inhibition effect.” The influence channels exhibit heterogeneity, contingent on industries, growth stages, and import orders. We further find that the entry of new products, improvement in the quality of existing products, and reallocation of internal resources within the enterprise account for product quality change in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Industrial robot
• export product quality
• productivity improvement effect
• innovation inhibition effect
• quality decomposition

JEL:

• F14
• L15
• L60
• O14
• O30

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge financial support from the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (Project No: 20JZD016), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No: 71973125), and the Zhejiang Soft Science Research Program (Project No: 2022C35031).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data supporting this study’s findings are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

Data Sharing

I confirm that my article contains a Data Availability Statement even if no data is available (list of sample statements) unless my article type does not require one (e.g., Editorials, Corrections, Book Reviews, etc.).

I confirm that I have included a citation for available data in my references section unless my article type is exempt.

Notes

1. Some studies find that robotization or automation can improve innovation directly, and industrial robots can also reshape the firm organizational structure, which can have a large impact on innovation. However, for the data used in this article, the robots imported in China during 2000–2014 were more predominantly used for production purposes (Fan et al. 2021), so this effect is not discussed primarily and specifically in this article.

2. The mathematical details are in Appendix B and C.

3. The detailed explanations of variables are in Appendix A.

4. Quality can be defined as an attribute that will increase the evaluation of all consumers. But it is different from the product price. There are some problems in using export prices as a method to measure the quality of export products, because export prices may change for reasons other than quality, such as cost information. Hallak and Schott (2011) gave an example of shirts: the price of Chinese shirts is lower than that of Italian shirts, probably not because of low quality, but because of low production costs.

5. The HS8 codes involved in industrial robots include 84,864,031 (factory automatic handling robot), 84289040 (handling robot), 85152120 (resistance welding robot), 85153120 (arc welding robot), 85158010 (laser welding robot), 84248920 (spraying robot), 84,795010 (multifunctional robot), and 84795,090 (other robots).

6. To increase the feasibility of the data, we follow Lu and Yu (2015) in the sample selection. First, we select manufacturing enterprises for the empirical analysis to be consistent with the existing literature. Then, we exclude enterprises with paid-in capital less than or equal to 0 and with foreign capital less than 0, observed values that do not meet the scale standard and violate the accounting principles and key indicators that have values that are missing, zero, or less than zero. As the research object is the export product quality of multi-product enterprises, we exclude the sample of single-product enterprises.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Major Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research by Ministry of Education of China [20JZD016]; Major Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research by the Ministry of Education of China [21JZD022]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [71973125]; Zhejiang Soft Science Research Program [2022C35031].