The transmission of knowledge across firms is typically difficult to measure.
By matching employer-employee data with trade data at the firm level, we
are able to identify the transmission of export experience, i.e. experience
acquired through participation in the export activity of previous employers,
and to quantify the impact of this valuable knowledge on workers’ wages
and firms’ trade status. We find that export experience corresponds to a 5% wage premium for managers but not for other workers. Most of the premium arises at the time of employer change and it is robust to controlling for a wealth of workers’ and firms’ characteristics including worker-trade
status fixed effects, past employer size and productivity, and broad employer change patterns. On the employing firm side, we find that export experience positively affects entry into the export activity and matters more than firm size and productivity. A one standard deviation increase of the share of currently employed managers with export experience more than doubles the
probability to start exporting. On the contrary, export experience acquired
by managers from previous employers does not affect the capacity to keep
exporting while firm size and productivity do. We address endogeneity issues by using an IV strategy that mimics a random matching between managers with export experience and firms. The IV strategy relies on information on the spatial variation in the supply of displaced managers with export experience and on firms’ internal hierarchical structure as a proxy for future recruiting intentions.