Managers' Mobility, Trade Performance and Wages

Knowledge is key to the competitiveness and success of an organisation. Firms and their managers acquire knowledge via a variety of different channels, which are often difficult to track down and quantify. By matching employer-employee data with trade data at the firm level, Giordano Mion, together with Luca David Opromollla, has shown that the export experience acquired by managers in previous firms leads their current firm towards higher export performance, and commands a sizeable wage premium for the manager. Moreover, export knowledge is decisive when it is market-specific: managers with experience related to markets served by their current firm receive an even higher wage premium; firms are more likely to enter markets where their managers have experience; exporters are more likely to stay in those markets; and their sales are on average higher. His findings indicate that managers' export experience is a first-order feature in the data with an impact on a firm's export performance that is at least as strong as that of firm productivity, for example.

The main focus of Giordano Mion's research is on international trade (productivity, firm heterogeneity and gains from trade), on regional economics (agglomeration, externalities and local institutions) and on labour economics (sorting, matching and managers). During his stay in Munich, he will deliver a series of CES Lectures on "Firm Heterogeneity, Trade and Organisation".

Giordano Mion is Professor in International Trade at the Department of Economics, University of Sussex, and was previously a Lecturer at the Department of Geography and Environment of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is also affiliated with the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Spatial Economics Research Centre (SERC). He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Geography. He earned his PhD in Economics at Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium and has been a post-doc and FNRS fellow at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE), Belgium.