关键词: 互联网深化, 信息不确定性, 企业出口平稳性

Abstract: As an important tool to search and disseminate information, the Internet helps to moderate the impact of international market uncertainty on enterprise export decision-making, which is helpful to stabilize enterprise export expectations and guarantee the sustainable duration of export enterprises. This paper extends the research framework of Fernandes and Tang ( 2014) to include the Internet penetration and export agglomeration into the framework of the heterogeneous trade enterprise model. By separating the influence of export agglomeration on enterprise export behavior, the paper theoretically investigates the mechanism and direction of increased Internet penetration affecting enterprise export behavior, especially the export sustainable duration. In our setting, different from export agglomeration that affects both need shock and cost shock of enterprises, the information spillover effect of Internet penetration will make enterprises modify the expectations of international market uncertainty by the Bayesian Rule. For cities with high penetration of the Internet, enterprises will estimate the cost shock of the destination market more accurately, thus low critical productivity of enterprises entering the export market can improve export participation and export stability. However, the increased Internet penetration has no effect on the intensive margin of enterprises in the destination market. Using the matching data of the Chinese industrial enterprise database, Chinese customs database, and Chinese city statistical yearbook database from 2000 to 2013, the empirical results support the theoretical prediction on the enterprise, destination country, and product levels. Our paper implies that the Chinese government should take full advantage of the micro mechanism of the Internet reducing information uncertainty and promote the stable growth of foreign trade.

Key words: Internet, Information Uncertainty, Enterprise Export Stability