Export Experience of Managers and the Internationalisation of Firms

Abstract

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.

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