Europe's exports superstar - it's the organisation! Bruegel Working Paper 2015/05, 15 July 2015

What explains Germany’s superb export performance? Is Germany’s export behaviour very distinct compared to other European countries? The authors explore the organisational responses to competition of 14,000 exporting firms in seven European countries. The paper examines the export business model of the median exporter and of the top one percent exporters in each country, accounting for 20 percent to 55 percent of total exports. What do these firms do to become superstars? The authors find, first, that the export market share of the median exporter in each of the countries to the world more than tripled (in some cases the export market share increases tenfold) for firms that combine decentralised management with offshoring of production to low-wage countries. Exporters which abstain from any organisational adjustment do very badly. Decentralised management provides incentives for workers for product improvements allowing exporters to compete on quality. Offshoring production to low-wage countries reduces costs allowing exporters to compete on price. Second, we find that Germany is the leading quality exporter in Europe followed by Austria and Spain. Among the top 10 percent of exporters there is no single firm with low quality in Germany and Austria, which suggest that decentralised management has provided incentives for quality in these countries. Third, Germany’s exports are less vulnerable to price increases, while exports from France and Italy respond strongly to price changes, and thus costs reductions via offshoring benefits these countries most

Earnings Inequality and the Global Division of Labor: Evidence from the Executive Labor Market

Many industrialized economies have seen a rapid rise in top income inequality and in the globalization of production since the 1980s. In this paper I propose an open economy model of executive pay to study how offshoring affects the pay level and incentives of top earners. The model introduces a simple principal-agent problem into a heterogeneous firm talent assignment model and endogenizes pay levels and the sensitivity of pay to performance in general equilibrium. Using unique data of manager-firm matches including executives from stock market listed firms across the U.S. and Europe, I quantify the model predictions empirically. Overall, I find that between 2000 and 2014 offshoring has increased executive pay levels, raised earnings inequality across executives and increased the sensitivity of pay to firm performance

Earnings Inequality and the Global Division of Labor: Evidence from the Executive Labor Market

Many industrialized economies have seen a rapid rise in top income inequality and in the globalization of production since the 1980s. In this paper I propose an open economy model of executive pay to study how offshoring affects the pay level and incentives of top earners. The model introduces a simple principal-agent problem into a heterogeneous firm talent assignment model and endogenizes pay levels and the sensitivity of pay to performance in general equilibrium. Using unique data of manager-firm matches including executives from stock market listed firms across the U.S. and Europe, I quantify the model predictions empirically. Overall, I find that between 2000 and 2014 offshoring has increased executive pay levels, raised earnings inequality across executives and increased the sensitivity of pay to firm performance

Trade, Technologies, and the Evolution of Corporate Governance

Do international trade and technological change influence how firms create incentives for human capital? I present a model that incorporates agency problems into a framework with firm heterogeneity and human capital. My model indicates that trade liberalizations and skill-biased technological change alter the way how the largest firms in an economy incentivize their managers. Increases in managerial reservation wages lead to a reduction in corporate governance investments and a rise in performance compensation since monitoring managers becomes less efficient. Using data on CEO compensation and entrenchment opportunities in public industrial firms in the U.S., I document strong empirical regularities in support of the model predictions. Firms allow for more managerial entrenchment and offer larger CEO compensation when their industries become more open to trade or when production becomes more I.T. intensive

Trade, Technologies, and the Evolution of Corporate Governance

Do international trade and technological change influence how firms create incentives for human capital? I present a model that incorporates agency problems into a framework with firm heterogeneity and human capital. My model indicates that trade liberalizations and skill-biased technological change alter the way how the largest firms in an economy incentivize their managers. Increases in managerial reservation wages lead to a reduction in corporate governance investments and a rise in performance compensation since monitoring managers becomes less efficient. Using data on CEO compensation and entrenchment opportunities in public industrial firms in the U.S., I document strong empirical regularities in support of the model predictions. Firms allow for more managerial entrenchment and offer larger CEO compensation when their industries become more open to trade or when production becomes more I.T. intensive

Trade, Technologies, and the Evolution of Corporate Governance

Do international trade and technological change influence how firms create incentives for human capital? I present a model that incorporates agency problems into a framework with firm heterogeneity and human capital. My model indicates that trade liberalizations and skill-biased technological change alter the way how the largest firms in an economy incentivize their managers. Increases in managerial reservation wages lead to a reduction in corporate governance investments and a rise in performance compensation since monitoring managers becomes less efficient. Using data on CEO compensation and entrenchment opportunities in public industrial firms in the U.S., I document strong empirical regularities in support of the model predictions. Firms allow for more managerial entrenchment and offer larger CEO compensation when their industries become more open to trade or when production becomes more I.T. intensive

Import Competition and the Composition of Firm Investments

We study how foreign competition affects the composition of investments inside firms. A parsimonious model predicts that firms have an incentive to shift their investments towards more short-term assets when exposed to tougher competition. Using data on expenditures of listed US companies into various asset classes with different lifespans, we document empirical evidence that is consistent with this prediction. Over a fifteen year period between 1995 and 2009, the rise in import competition is associated with a reduction of the firm-specific asset lifespan by about 4.5% on average. We additionally exploit the Chinese WTO accession as an exogenous shock in firm expectations about future exposure to competition

Import Competition and the Composition of Firm Investments

We study how foreign competition affects the composition of investments inside firms. A parsimonious model predicts that firms have an incentive to shift their investments towards more short-term assets when exposed to tougher competition. Using data on expenditures of listed US companies into various asset classes with different lifespans, we document empirical evidence that is consistent with this prediction. Over a fifteen year period between 1995 and 2009, the rise in import competition is associated with a reduction of the firm-specific asset lifespan by about 4.5% on average. We additionally exploit the Chinese WTO accession as an exogenous shock in firm expectations about future exposure to competition

Trade in Tasks and the Organization of Firms

We incorporate trade in tasks à la Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into a small open economy version of the theory of firm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how offshoring affects the way firms organize. We show that the offshoring of production tasks leads firms to reorganize with a more decentralized management, improving the competitiveness of the offshoring firms. We show further that the offshoring of managerial tasks relaxes the constraint on managers but toughens competition, and thus has an ambiguous impact on the level of decentralized management and CEO wages of the offshoring firms. In sufficiently open economies, however, managerial offshoring unambiguously leads to more decentralized management and to larger CEO wages. We test the predictions of the model based on original firm level data we designed and collected of 660 Austrian and German multinational firms with 2200 subsidiaries in Eastern Europe. We find that offshoring firms are 33.4% more decentralized than non-offshoring firms. We find further that the average fraction of managers offshored reduces the level of decentralized management by 3.1%, but increases the level of decentralized management by 4% in industries with a level of openness above the 25th percentile of the openness distribution. Lastly, we find that one additional offshored manager lowers CEO wages relative to workers by 4.9%