The Internationalization of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises: the Effect of Family Management, Human Capital and Foreign Ownership

Daniele Cerrato and Mariacristina Piva

No dises0748, DISCE - Quaderni del Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE)

Abstract: This paper focuses on factors affecting the internationalization of SMEs. Based on both international businessand and family business literatures, we develop three hypotheses that relate the internationalization of SMEs’ to familymanagement,human capital, and presence of foreign shareholders. Relying on data from a large sample of Italian manufacturing SMEs, we find that involvement of the owning family in management negatively influences export propensity but, once the choice to gointernational has been made, the degree of internationalization of the firm is not significantly different with respect to the composition of the management team. Our results also show that the level of human capital and the presence of foreign shareholders in the SME positively influence both export propensity and export intensity. Size and age of the firm as well as industry characteristics are included in the empirical analysis as control variables.

Keywords: internationalization; SMEs; export; family-based management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L21 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2007-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in Review of Economics, Month aaaa, pages nn1-nn2

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Related works:
Journal Article: The internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises: the effect of family management, human capital and foreign ownership (2012)
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