Topic: Firm-to-Firm Referrals

Speaker: Jing Cai, Associate Professor, University of Maryland

Time: 10:00am-11:30am, December 18

Location: 4-101

Abstract:

We make randomized firm-to-firm referrals between 700 supplier and client firms in the industry producing the Chinese writing brush. Subsidized referrals lead to subsequent transactions and a partial crowding out of prior partners; information-only referrals have no effect. The referrals increase revenue, profit, and hours worked in supplier firms and growth-oriented client firms. Treated suppliers increase product quality, while treated clients expand product variety into higher-quality products, suggesting that the referrals enable complementary upgrading. Treated firms increase beliefs about the value of partners, search for partners, and the number of non-referred partners, suggesting that pessimistic beliefs is a key partnering friction. The referrals generate very large private and social returns.

Speaker Biography:

Jing Cai is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2012. Her research areas are development economics and household finance. Her current research examines the growth of micro-enterprises and SMEs, impacts of tax incentives on firm behavior, and diffusion and impacts of financial innovations in developing countries. Dr. Cai is a Co-Chair of the firm sector of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). She currently serves as an associate editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, and the Economic Development and Cultural Change.