This paper focuses on factors affecting the internationalization of SMEs. Based on both international businessand and family business literatures, we develop three hypotheses that relate the internationalization of SMEs’ to familymanagement,human capital, and presence of foreign shareholders. Relying on data from a large sample of Italian manufacturing SMEs, we find that involvement of the owning family in management negatively influences export propensity but, once the choice to gointernational has been made, the degree of internationalization of the firm is not significantly different with respect to the composition of the management team. Our results also show that the level of human capital and the presence of foreign shareholders in the SME positively influence both export propensity and export intensity. Size and age of the firm as well as industry characteristics are included in the empirical analysis as control variables.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Length: 25 pages Date of creation: Oct 2007 Date of revision: Publication status: Published in Review of Economics, Month aaaa, pages nn1-nn2 Handle: RePEc:ctc:serie2:dises0748
Find related papers by JEL classification: L21 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Business Objectives of the Firm
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: