International managerial skill and big Colombian exporting firms' performance, 2006-2014

This paper proposes and estimates a two-step methodology to measure international managerial skill and calculate its impact on firm performance, using a sample of the biggest private Colombian exporting firms. The first step quantifies the manager’s organizational capital contribution to improve production efficiency (ability to assemble inputs into final goods) and/or quality capacity (skill to make high quality goods) mechanisms described by Bloom et al. (2021), through the median of export unit value regression residuals at firm-year level multiplied by -1 for products that compete in the international market by price. Then, second step firm performance regression results indicate that: i) international managerial quality has a significative and robust positive effect on total exported value via intensive margin, ii) exported value elasticity relative to international managerial quality is statistically equal than exported value elasticity relative to exogenous global demand shocks, and iii) better managers in the international market do not necessarily upgrade export quality.