Talents from Abroad. Foreign Managers and Productivity in the United Kingdom

Dimitrios Exadactylos (), Massimo Riccaboni () and Armando Rungi
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Dimitrios Exadactylos: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca

No 01/2019, Working Papers from IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca

Abstract: In this paper, we test the contribution of foreign management on firms competitiveness. We use a novel dataset on the careers of 165,084 managers employed by 13,106 companies in the United Kingdom in the period 2009-2017. We find that a domestic manufacturing firm becomes on average between 9% and 12% more productive after hiring at least one foreign manager. Interestingly, productivity gains by domestic firms after recruiting foreign managers are similar in magnitude to gains after foreign acquisitions as from previous literature. Eventually, we do not find significant gains by foreign-owned firms hiring foreign managers. Our identification strategy combines difference-in-difference and matching techniques to challenge reverse causality. We proxy firms competitiveness either by total factor productivity or by technical efficiency derived from stochastic frontier analyses. Eventually, we argue that limits to the circulation of talents, as for example in case of a Brexit event, may hamper the allocation of labor productive resources.

Keywords: managers; productivity; job mobility; spillovers; multinational enterprises; migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 F23 J61 L23 L25 M11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2019-12, Revised 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-int, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in EIC working paper series

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http://eprints.imtlucca.it/4073/1/WP%20EIC%201_2019.pdf First version, 2019

Related works:
Working Paper: Talents from Abroad. Foreign Managers and Productivity in the United Kingdom (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ial:wpaper:1/2019

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