Replication Data for: Chains of Love? Global Production and the Firm-Level Diffusion of Labor Standards

Under what conditions does the global economy serve as a means for the diffusion of labor standards and practices? We anticipate variation among internationally engaged firms in their propensity to improve labor standards. Upgrading is most likely when a firm’s products exhibit significant cross-market differences in markups, making accessing high-standards overseas markets particularly profitable. Additionally, upgrading is more likely when lead firms attach a high salience to labor standards. Therefore, while participation in global production induces “trading up” behaviors among firms overall, the effect strength varies across industries. We test our expectations via a survey experiment, which queries foreign firms operating in Vietnam about their willingness to invest in labor-related upgrading. We find strong evidence for the effect of markups on upgrading choices and suggestive evidence for the saliency mechanism
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Note:
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1. Run "20171205_MaleskyMosely_ReadMe_Master.do" file to run through and create all working data, analyses, figures, tables, supplementary information, and codebook with a single push of the button.
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2. Data converted from STATA 14 to STATA 13 to ease ingestion. All files can be run in STATA 13.
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3. Chinese customs data is propietary and cannot be released at the product level. It is owned by the Chinese government. We provide our code of how we converted Chinese Customs Data and also provide aggregate markup data at the two-digit ISIC Code level.