IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdf/wpaper/2014-6.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Firm-Level Evidence for the Language Investment Effect on SME Exporters

Author

Listed:

Abstract

Both analysis of international trade and the knowledge resource theory of the firm imply that language skills should play a vital role in exporting. This may be apparent to large multinationals with sites in many different linguistic locations, but we show it is less obvious to smaller companies. With data on the language used by each of a large sample of European small and medium sized enterprises in their export markets we test and estimate the effects of language assets on language performance in export markets and on export sales. Controlling for the possibility that language skills may be acquired by exporting, we find a very substantial export return to linguistic expertise, indicative of unexploited gains from investment in languages. There is also evidence of greater under-investment in language skills in English-speaking Europe, which we show can be a prediction of Konya s (2006) trade model.

Suggested Citation

  • Foreman-Peck, James & Zhou, Peng, 2014. "Firm-Level Evidence for the Language Investment Effect on SME Exporters," Cardiff Economics Working Papers E2014/6, Cardiff University, Cardiff Business School, Economics Section.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdf:wpaper:2014/6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://carbsecon.com/wp/E2014_6.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bernard, Andrew B. & Bradford Jensen, J., 1999. "Exceptional exporter performance: cause, effect, or both?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(1), pages 1-25, February.
    2. James E. Anderson & Eric van Wincoop, 2004. "Trade Costs," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 42(3), pages 691-751, September.
    3. William K. Hutchinson, 2002. "Does Ease of Communication Increase Trade? Commonality of Language and Bilateral Trade," Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers 0217, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics.
    4. Jonathan Eaton & Samuel Kortum & Francis Kramarz, 2004. "Dissecting Trade: Firms, Industries, and Export Destinations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(2), pages 150-154, May.
    5. Andersson, Svante, 2004. "Internationalization in different industrial contexts," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 19(6), pages 851-875, November.
    6. William K. Hutchinson, 2002. "Does Ease of Communication Increase Trade? Commonality of Language and Bilateral Trade," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 49(5), pages 544-556, November.
    7. Thierry Mayer & Gianmarco Ottaviano, 2007. "The happy few: the internationalisation of European firms New facts based on firm-level evidence," Working Papers hal-03459258, HAL.
    8. Choi, E. Kwan, 2002. "Trade and the adoption of a universal language," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 265-275.
    9. Thierry Mayer & Gianmarco Ottaviano, 2008. "The Happy Few: The Internationalisation of European Firms," Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy, Springer;ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics;Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), vol. 43(3), pages 135-148, May.
    10. István Kónya, 2006. "Modeling Cultural Barriers in International Trade," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 14(3), pages 494-507, August.
    11. Douglas Staiger & James H. Stock, 1997. "Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 65(3), pages 557-586, May.
    12. Chong Ju Choi & Carla C. J. M. Millar & Caroline Y. L. Wong, 2005. "Knowledge and Competition," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Knowledge Entanglements, chapter 0, pages 97-117, Palgrave Macmillan.
    13. Thierry Mayer & Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano, 2008. "The Happy Few: New Facts on the Internationalization of European Firms Based on Firm-level Evidence," L'industria, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 2, pages 221-244.
    14. Roper, Stephen & Du, Jun & Love, James H., 2008. "Modelling the innovation value chain," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 37(6-7), pages 961-977, July.
    15. Paul Westhead & Mike Wright & Deniz Ucbasaran, 2004. "Internationalization of private firms: environmental turbulence and organizational strategies and resources," Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(6), pages 501-522, November.
    16. Jan Johanson & Jan-Erik Vahlne, 1977. "The Internationalization Process of the Firm—A Model of Knowledge Development and Increasing Foreign Market Commitments," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 8(1), pages 23-32, March.
    17. repec:hal:wpspec:info:hdl:2441/10147 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Hutchinson, William K, 2002. "Does Ease of Communication Increase Trade? Commonality of Language and Bilateral Trade," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 49(5), pages 544-556, December.
    19. José Pinho & Lurdes Martins, 2010. "Exporting barriers: Insights from Portuguese small- and medium-sized exporters and non-exporters," Journal of International Entrepreneurship, Springer, vol. 8(3), pages 254-272, September.
    20. Kathleen R. Conner & C. K. Prahalad, 1996. "A Resource-Based Theory of the Firm: Knowledge Versus Opportunism," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 7(5), pages 477-501, October.
    21. Barbara Fliess & Carlos Busquets, 2006. "The Role of Trade Barriers in SME Internationalisation," OECD Trade Policy Papers 45, OECD Publishing.
    22. Jane Kassis Henderson, 2005. "Language Diversity in International Management Teams," International Studies of Management & Organization, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 35(1), pages 66-82, January.
    23. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/10147 is not listed on IDEAS
    24. William K. Hutchinson, 2005. "“Linguistic Distance” as a Determinant of Bilateral Trade," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 72(1), pages 1-15, July.
    25. Ku, Hyejin & Zussman, Asaf, 2010. "Lingua franca: The role of English in international trade," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 75(2), pages 250-260, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hadia Fakhreldin, 2018. "Examining the Effect of Cultural Intelligence on the Internationalization of Swiss Small and Medium Enterprises," International Business Research, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 11(6), pages 89-101, June.
    2. Hao Wei & Linlin Deng & Peng Zhou, 2023. "The impact of globalization on domestic employment," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 55(29), pages 3390-3403, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Nicolas Sauter, 2012. "Talking trade: language barriers in intra-Canadian commerce," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 42(1), pages 301-323, February.
    2. Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten & Libman, Alexander & Yu, Xiaofan, 2014. "Economic integration in China: Politics and culture," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(2), pages 470-492.
    3. Volpe Martincus, Christian & Carballo, Jerónimo, 2010. "Beyond the average effects: The distributional impacts of export promotion programs in developing countries," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(2), pages 201-214, July.
    4. Matthieu Crozet & Keith Head & Thierry Mayer, 2012. "Quality Sorting and Trade: Firm-level Evidence for French Wine," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 79(2), pages 609-644.
    5. Jonas Onkelinx & Leo Sleuwaegen, 2010. "Internationalization strategy and performance of small and medium sized enterprises," Working Paper Research 197, National Bank of Belgium.
    6. Melitz, Jacques & Toubal, Farid, 2014. "Native language, spoken language, translation and trade," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(2), pages 351-363.
    7. repec:edn:sirdps:417 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Melitz, Marc J. & Redding, Stephen J., 2014. "Heterogeneous Firms and Trade," Handbook of International Economics, in: Gopinath, G. & Helpman, . & Rogoff, K. (ed.), Handbook of International Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 0, pages 1-54, Elsevier.
    9. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/10148 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Volpe Martincus, Christian & Carballo, Jerónimo, 2010. "Beyond the average effects: The distributional impacts of export promotion programs in developing countries," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(2), pages 201-214, July.
    11. Peter Broer & Jürgen Antony, 2010. "Linkages between the Financial and the Real Sector of the Economy: A Literature Survey," CPB Document 216.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    12. Koenig, Pamina & Mayneris, Florian & Poncet, Sandra, 2010. "Local export spillovers in France," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 54(4), pages 622-641, May.
    13. Roc Armenter & Miklós Koren, 2015. "Economies Of Scale And The Size Of Exporters," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 13(3), pages 482-511, June.
    14. Egger, Hartmut & Egger, Peter & Kreickemeier, Udo & Moser, Christoph, 2020. "The exporter wage premium when firms and workers are heterogeneous," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 130(C).
    15. Sui, Sui & Morgan, Horatio M. & Baum, Matthias, 2015. "Internationalization of immigrant-owned SMEs: The role of language," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 50(4), pages 804-814.
    16. Guillaume Daudin, 2005. "Les transactions de la mondialisation," Revue de l'OFCE, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 92(1), pages 221-262.
    17. Michele Fratianni & Francesco Marchionne, 2012. "Trade Costs and Economic Development," Economic Geography, Clark University, vol. 88(2), pages 137-163, April.
    18. Daria Ciriaci & Alessandro Muscio, 2011. "University choice, research quality and graduates' employability: Evidence from Italian national survey data," Working Papers 48, AlmaLaurea Inter-University Consortium.
    19. Jan Fidrmuc & Jarko Fidrmuc, 2009. "Foreign Languages and Trade," CEDI Discussion Paper Series 09-03, Centre for Economic Development and Institutions(CEDI), Brunel University.
    20. Egger, Peter H. & Ehrlich, Maximilian v. & Nelson, Douglas R., 2020. "The trade effects of skilled versus unskilled migration," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(2), pages 448-464.
    21. Lien, Donald & Oh, Chang Hoon & Selmier, W. Travis, 2012. "Confucius institute effects on China's trade and FDI: Isn't it delightful when folks afar study Hanyu?," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 147-155.
    22. Davide Castellani & Francesco Serti & Chiara Tomasi, 2010. "Firms in International Trade: Importers’ and Exporters’ Heterogeneity in Italian Manufacturing Industry," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(3), pages 424-457, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Internationalisation; language skills; SMEs;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
    • F13 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations
    • H52 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Education
    • R42 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics - - - Government and Private Investment Analysis; Road Maintenance; Transportation Planning

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdf:wpaper:2014/6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Yongdeng Xu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ecscfuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.