Open AccessRecruiting strategic human capital from MNCs—Does hiring MNC managers enable exporting in domestic firms?
Author(s) -
Pedro de Faria,
Torben Schubert,
Wolfgang Sofka
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0257922
Subject(s) - multinational corporation , business , human capital , odds , industrial organization , test (biology) , marketing , market economy , economics , finance , medicine , logistic regression , paleontology , biology
Exporting is a central growth strategy for most firms and managers with international experience are instrumental for export decisions. We suggest that such managers can be hired from Multinational Corporations (MNCs). We integrate theory from strategic human capital research into models explaining export decisions. We theorize that hiring managers from MNCs increases the odds of domestic firms to start exporting and this effect depends on the similarities between hiring firms and MNCs. We hypothesize that young firms will benefit comparatively less from hiring MNC managers. In contrast, firms with internationally diverse workforces and with high degrees of hierarchical specialization will benefit the most from hiring MNC managers. We test and support these hypotheses for 474,926 domestic firms in Sweden, which we observe between 2007 and 2015.