Managers' mobility, trade performance, and wages

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Mion, Giordano; Opromolla, Luca David
• 署名单位: University of Surrey; Banco de Portugal; Universidade de Lisboa
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2014.06.001
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 85-101
• 关键词: Managers; Firm trade performance; job mobility; Export experience; wage premium

摘要

Knowledge is key to the competitiveness and success of an organization and in particular of a firm. Firms and their managers acquire knowledge via a variety of different channels which are often difficult to track down and quantify. By matching employer-employee data with trade data at the firm level we show that the export experience acquired by managers in previous firms leads their current firm toward higher export performance, and commands a sizeable wage premium for the manager. Moreover, export knowledge is decisive when it is market-specific: managers with experience related to markets served by their current firm receive an even higher wage premium; firms are more likely to enter markets where their managers have experience; exporters are more likely to stay in those markets, and their sales are on average higher. Our findings are robust to controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and, more broadly, endogeneity and indicate that managers' export experience is a first-order feature in the data with an impact on a firm's export performance that is, for example, at least as strong as that of firm productivity. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.