CEO Overseas Experience and Firm Internationalization: Before and After the Global Financial Crisis

Purpose - This study explores the contextual factors that affect the relationship between CEO overseas experience and firm internationalization. This study incorporates a wide range of contextual factors, including mega, macro, and micro variables. In particular, this study goes a step further from prior studies by incorporating a higher-order variable i.e., the global financial crisis that can constrain the managerial discretion of a CEO. Design/methodology - To structure the balanced data set before and after the 2008 global financial crisis, we used the data for the years from 2002 to 2014 from a sample of Korean manufacturing firms. Ultimately, 1101 firm-year unbalanced panel observations from 101 firms were used for the analysis. Findings - Our main findings can be summarized as follows. CEO overseas experience is positively related to firm internationalization. However, this relationship varies depending on the CEOs level of managerial discretion. As for the constraining moderation, the global financial crisis weakened the positive relationship between CEO overseas experience and firm internationalization. As for the enabling moderation, the CEOs tenure strengthened the relationship. Originality/value - This study adopted the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) framework to explain the relationship between CEO overseas experience and firm internationalization. Moreover, we argue that the CEO-internationalization relationship depends on the specific context of the managerial discretion, focusing on the 2008 global financial crisis. Empirically, this study adopted the 2SLS procedure to correct endogeneity. Instead of taking the actual value of prior internationalization as a control, we estimated prior internationalization using the instrument variables at an industry level. This procedure made our estimation more robust.