Managers' Mobility, Trade Status, and Wages

Giordano Mion and Luca David Opromolla

No 8230, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper investigates whether the arrival of managers with export experience, i.e. experience acquired through participation in the export activity of previous employers, is related to firms' international trade status and to what extent this relationship is of a causal nature. We construct a worker-firm matched panel dataset which enables us to track managers across different firms over time and observe firms' trading stance as well as a large set of workers' and firms' characteristics. Contrary to blue and white collars, we find that managers are paid a sizeable premium for export experience which has both a level and a trend component. Conditioning for the firm past trade status, we find that a one standard deviation increase in the firm's share of managers' with export experience corresponds to about 35% more chances of starting to export. The impact is stronger for larger firms and is roughly of the same order of magnitude of the firm productivity effect. On the contrary, export experience acquired by managers from previous employers positively affects the capacity to keep exporting in small firms only. To give a causality flavor to our findings, we use in a final step an IV strategy that mimics a random matching between managers with export experience and firms. IV estimations indicate that export experience matters even more for entry while it has no effect on exit.

Keywords: Displacement; Export experience; Managers; Trade status; Wage premia; Worker mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 J31 J60 L25 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP8230 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Managers' Mobility, Trade Status and Wages (2011)
Working Paper: Managers’ Mobility, Trade Status, and Wages (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:8230

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP8230

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().