Export Experience of Managers and the Internationalisation of Firms

Abstract

As the firm gravitates toward being the core in analyses of international trade, the possibilities for learning from cross‐disciplines studies increase. Managerial resources underlie export initiation in the theory of the multinational enterprise developed in international business studies, but they are largely ignored in empirical studies of international trade. This is probably not because they are unimportant, but more due to the challenges of identifying and measuring these resources. We exploit Danish employer–employee matched data to overcome this challenge and analyse the impact of managers' international experience, together with other managerial characteristics, on the likelihood that the firm starts exporting. We find that productivity and fixed costs associated with exporting are not the sole determinants of selection of firms into international markets, but that ‘managerial inputs’ are just as important. Our data allow us to identify manager export experience based on the CEO's historical career as documented in official registry statistics, a feature that makes our analysis different from other work that relies on self‐assessments.

Foreign market experience, learning by hiring and firm export performance

“…Previous export experience among workers and managers has been found to be among the key determinants of export entry decisions, export status and trade intensity for Portuguese firms (Mion and Opromolla 2014). Similarly, Sala and Yalcin (2014) and Minondo (2011) show that hiring managers with previous export experience is positively associated with a firm's likelihood of foreign market entry, based on micro data from Denmark and Spain and probit or linear probability models.…”

“…Only a limited number of studies have used representative firm-level datasets to estimate its contribution in determining export decisions (e.g. Sala and Yalcin 2014;Mion and Opromolla 2014).…”

Ethnic diversity and firms' export behavior

“…While it is consolidated that productivity determines firms' selection into exporting, recent hypotheses have started to investigate more closely the deliberate efforts undertaken by firms to become exporters (conscious self-selection). Some studies have explored technological investments or quality upgrading (Alvarez and Lopez, 2005; Iacovone and Javorcik, 2012), while other studies have focused on human capital investments with firms building up the right expertise in preparation for exporting (Sala and Yalcin, 2012;Molina and Muendler, 2013). Our paper identifies the diversity of the workforce as a driver of internationalization, which 4 …”

Empirical Relationships among Technological Characteristics, Global Orientation, and Internationalisation of South Korean New Ventures

“…CEOs' global orientation and technological background, therefore, have positive (+) effects on internationalisation [37,39]. Kuemmerle [40] and Sala and Yalcin [41] have also suggested that a significant relationship exists between entrepreneurial characteristics such as global orientation and the speed or level of internationalisation. This association is due to CEOs' abilities to be able to reduce the cultural and psychological barriers, and we would like to define these abilities as global orientation.…”

“…Sala and Yalcin [41] also argued that entrepreneurs' global orientation were able to determine the level and pattern of internationalisation of INVs. Furthermore, in a study of 335 SMEs in Norway, Moen [24] found a significant relationship between CEOs' global orientation and the pace of internationalisation.…”