The objective of this paper is to show that part of the fixed cost of a firm’s trade expansion is due to the acquisition of new internal capabilities (e.g., technology, production processes or skills), which implies a costly change in the firm’s internal labor organization. We investigate the relationship between a firm’s labor structure, in terms of the relative number of managers, and the scope of its export portfolio, in terms of its product–destination varieties. The empirical analysis is based on a matched employer–employee dataset covering the population of French firms from tradable sectors over the period 2009–2015. Our analysis suggests that market expansion, both through export entry and export diversification, is associated with a change in the firm’s workforce composition, namely an increase in the number of managerial layers. These results are generally confirmed with the use of an instrumental variable approach to control for reverse causality. We show how these results are consistent with a simple model, where the complexity of a firm’s operations increases with the number of product–destination couples exported and the manager’s role is to address the unsolved problems arising from such increased operational complexity.

中文翻译：

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企业出口多元化和劳动力组成变化

本文的目的是表明公司贸易扩张的固定成本的一部分是由于收购了新的内部能力（例如技术，生产过程或技能），这意味着公司内部劳动力组织的代价很高。我们根据经理的相对人数调查企业的劳动力结构与就产品目标品种而言的出口组合范围之间的关系。实证分析是基于匹配的雇主-雇员数据集，该数据集涵盖了2009-2015年期间来自可交易部门的法国公司的人口。我们的分析表明，通过出口进入和出口多样化而进行的市场扩张与公司劳动力组成的变化（即管理层层数的增加）有关。这些结果通常通过使用工具变量方法来控制反向因果关系得到证实。