Talents from abroad. Foreign managers and productivity in the United Kingdom
Dimitrios Exadaktylos,
Massimo Riccaboni and
Armando Rungi
International Economics, 2024, vol. 177, issue C
Abstract:
In this paper, we test the contribution of foreign management to firm productivity. We use a novel data set on the careers of 115,505 managers employed in 10,238 firms in the UK from 2009–2017. We find that domestic manufacturing firms become, on average, 4.9% more productive and about 23.3% more capital intensive after hiring foreign managers. In particular, we find that prior industry-specific experience of foreign managers abroad allows spillover effects to domestic recruiting firms. On the other hand, we find no significant effect on foreign-owned firms after hiring foreign managers, possibly because technological spillovers have already occurred after takeovers by headquarters. The marginal productivity gain is twice as high when the new hires end up on all-British boards without a history of diversity. Our identification strategy combines matching techniques, difference-in-difference and pre-recruitment trends to challenge reverse causality. The results are robust to different specifications and sample composition effects. Ultimately, our results show how restrictions on the global mobility of managerial talent hamper the competitiveness of the domestic industry.
Keywords: Managers; Productivity; Job mobility; Migration; Multinational enterprises; Firm level (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 F23 J61 L25 M12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2110701723000860
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
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:eee:inteco:v:177:y:2024:i:c:s2110701723000860
DOI: 10.1016/j.inteco.2023.100474
Access Statistics for this article
International Economics is currently edited by Valerie Mignon and Marcelo Olarreaga
More articles in International Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).