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Every week, the Economics Group of King's Business School organises research seminars in economics. Bi-weekly the seminars are organised together with the Department of Political Economy and International Development. These seminars will take place on Wednesdays from 12.00 - 1.30 pm in Bush House, room (South) 3.01.
Abstract: Managerial knowledge spillovers and firm productivity
The present paper seeks to bring together empirical findings suggesting, on the one hand, that heterogeneity in managerial knowledge is an important driver of differences in firm productivity, and on the other, that labour mobility plays a central role in the transmission of knowledge between firms. We test whether the mobility of managers between firms leads to better firm performance by estimating a structural model of production and recovering firm-level productivity and markups. We explore the characteristics of movers and sending firms that result in productivity gains for hiring firms, at both the aggregate and industry levels. Results suggest that in low technology sectors, hiring managers with industry experience and higher education qualification increases productivity between 0.5% and 2%. In more knowledge intensive sectors, hiring from frontier firms plays a crucial role to increase productivity between 1.4% and 6% and this effect seems to be accompanied by increased markups.