This paper aims to study how firms’ export behavior is associated with their corporate governance.,This study uses whole population data of Estonian small and medium-sized enterprises: 9,530 exporters and 73,619 non-exporters. Several theory-driven corporate governance variables and exporting variables (based on previous studies) are used. Binary logistic regression is applied to study how exporters’ corporate governance differs from that of non-exporters. Eight additional continuous dependent variables are used to portray exporters’ internationalization with ordinary least squares regression. The robustness of the obtained base results is checked for younger/older and smaller/larger firms.,Having female board members did not lead to a higher likelihood of export activities. Experience – tenure’s length, board members’ age and other board memberships – provided mixed results. Having a larger board was associated with a higher export propensity and larger exports but a lower export share. A larger share of a chief executive officer’s shareholding was associated with lower export propensity, exporting less overall and activities on a smaller number of markets. The presence of a majority owner was associated with larger export share and export turnover, but more focus on the main export market. Firm age and size affected the results.,Previous studies about the interconnection of corporate governance and exporting have relied on varied theoretical explanations and limited sets of variables. This paper provides an extensive insight by using corporate governance variables emergent from various theoretical explanations accompanied by a large set of dependent exporting variables. The latter enables obtaining a more holistic view of the interconnection between the two phenomena.

中文翻译：

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出口行为与公司治理

本文旨在研究企业的出口行为如何与公司治理联系起来。本研究使用爱沙尼亚中小型企业的全部人口数据：9,530个出口商和73,619个非出口商。使用了一些理论驱动的公司治理变量和输出变量（基于先前的研究）。二元逻辑回归用于研究出口商的公司治理与非出口商的公司治理有何不同。八个附加的连续因变量用于通过普通最小二乘回归描述出口商的国际化。对于较小/较大和较小/较大的公司，检查所获得基本结果的稳健性。拥有女性董事会成员并没有导致较高的出口活动可能性。经验–任职期限，董事会成员的年龄和其他董事会成员资格-得出的结果参差不齐。董事会越大，出口倾向越高，出口越大，但出口份额却越低。首席执行官所持股份的较大份额与较低的出口倾向，较少的整体出口和较少数量的市场活动有关。大股东的存在与更大的出口份额和出口营业额有关，但更多地集中在主要出口市场上。公司的年龄和规模影响了结果。以前有关公司治理与出口的相互关系的研究依靠各种理论解释和有限的变量集。本文通过使用公司治理变量提供了广泛的见解，这些变量是从各种理论解释中衍生出来的，并伴随着大量的依赖出口变量。后者使得可以更全面地了解这两种现象之间的相互关系。