Knowledge Transfer from Multinationals through Labour Mobility: Are There Effects on Productivity, Product Sophistication and Exporting?

We investigate whether labour mobility from foreign-owned firms to local firms in the host economy is associated with an increase in productivity, export product complexity and other export indicators of domestic firms. Based on employer-employee level data from Estonia, we confirm that hiring emplo...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Emerging markets finance & trade 2019-09, Vol.55 (12), p.2774-2795
Main Authors: Masso, Jaan, Vahter, Priit
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Foreign owned US companies
knowledge spillovers
labour mobility
multinational enterprise
product complexity
product sophistication
Productivity
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We investigate whether labour mobility from foreign-owned firms to local firms in the host economy is associated with an increase in productivity, export product complexity and other export indicators of domestic firms. Based on employer-employee level data from Estonia, we confirm that hiring employees with experience from foreign-owned firms is associated with an increase in the total factor productivity (TFP) of the firm and the higher export propensity and breadth of export markets or products. However, on average, these within-firm effects on TFP appear to be not working through increases in the level of the complexity of the export product portfolio of domestically owned firms. One implication of this result is that other channels of upgrading than changes in the Hausmann-Hidalgo export product complexity measure may be more important in this context; for example, such as upgrading the tasks or activities in the global value chain of a product.
ISSN:1540-496X
1558-0938
DOI:10.1080/1540496X.2018.1530653