Working Paper
International Managerial Skill and Big Colombian Exporting Firms’ Performance, 2006-2014
This paper uses a sample of the biggest private Colombian exporting firms to propose and estimate a two-step methodology for measuring international managerial skill and calculating its impact on international firm performance. The first step quantifies the managerial team’s organizational capital contribution to rise firms’ export proficiency through the average of a regression residuals group conformed by export unit value residuals for differentiated products (multiplying by -1 the price competition products’ residuals) and export quantity residuals for homogeneous goods. The second step results indicate that: i) international managerial quality has a significant and robust positive effect on exported value, ii) better managers in the international market do not increase the number of exported products but upgrade export basket’s quality, and iii) exported value elasticity relative to international managerial quality is around 5 times larger than exported value elasticity relative to exogenous global demand shocks.
Key Words
- management practices
- exporting
- firm’s performance
- quality vs price competition