Firm internationalization and born global firms : On the causes and consequences of export market entry

Sammanfattning: The thesis consists of four self-contained essays on the topic of small firm internationalization. In the first essay I study the relationship between collateralizable assets and export market entry. There are often large sunk costs associated with export market entry, which firms have to finance somehow. A firm‘s access to external finance is therefore proxied by its collateralizable assets. These collateralizable assets are used as securitization in the firm‘s loan applications. The main finding of the paper is that tangible assets, i.e. assets with high collateralizable value, are an important determinant of export market entry.The remaining three essays study born global firms. The thesis‘s second essay is on the performance of manufacturing born global firms. Born global firms have previously been studied predominantly using qualitative methods instead of a quantitative approach as is done in this essay. Four different performance measures are used and evidence is found that born global firms perform superior five years subsequent to firm foundation when performance is measured by employment and sales per employee. However, for profitability and labor productivity no such effect can be identified. The OLS results are confirmed by a nearest neighbor matching approach, which shows similar results.The focus of the third essay is on a subset of KIBS firms that can be categorized as born global firms. In many economies, the role of KIBS has increased over the past couple of decades. Despite this fact, there has been little attempt to describe the sector‘s export activities. This paper studies the performance of born global KIBS firms. The paper is very similar to the second essay, but due to the heavy focus on manufacturing firms in studies of born global firms, KIBS firms deserve a separate treatment. The findings indicate that born global KIBS firms perform better in terms of employment growth and sales per employee. These findings are robust to different born global definitions and time horizons of firm performance.The fourth essay investigates whether employee characteristics matter for firm survival. The focus of the paper is on born global firms both within the manufacturing and KIBS industries. The methodology of choice in studying firm survival is the Cox proportional hazard models. The results show little significance of individual employee characteristics as determinant for survival rates when born global firms are investigated. Furthermore, neither spinouts nor firms categorized as future exporters show much significance on individual characteristics. However, when the sample is extended to include the total amount of new firms, we see that individual employee characteristics do matter for survival.