Heterogeneous Trade Elasticity and Managerial Skills

Maria Bas (), Lionel Fontagné (), Irene Iodice () and Gianluca Orefice ()
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Maria Bas: CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Lionel Fontagné: CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Irene Iodice: University of Bielefeld, CESifo - CESifo, Universität Bielefeld = Bielefeld University
Gianluca Orefice: Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, CEPII - Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales - Centre d'analyse stratégique, CESifo - CESifo, LEDa - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dauphine - IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: This paper investigates the role played by firms' managerial skills in the heterogeneous reaction of exporters to common exogenous changes in their international competitiveness (here captured by changes in the real exchange rate). Relying on a simple theoretical framework, we show that firms with better managerial skills have higher profits, market power, and are able to adapt their markup more when faced with a competitiveness shock. We test this prediction relying on detailed firm-product-destination level export data from France for the period 1995-2007 matched with specific information on the firms' share of managers. Our findings show that managerial intensive firms have larger exporter price elasticity to real exchange rate variations. The effect is not trivial: in the wake of a depreciation, exporters whose management intensity is one standard deviation higher than the average, increase their prices by 51% to 73% more than the average exporter. This finding is robust to controlling for the alternative explanations suggested by the previous literature to explain the heterogeneous pass-through of firms.

Keywords: Exchange rate pass-through; heterogeneous pricing-to-market; managerial skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-03
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-05000273v1
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