Research On The Influence Of Executives’ Professional Background On The Quality Of Export Products

In the rapid development of China’s foreign trade,the reputation of "Made in China" has not been improved at the same time,and the export strategy of "low quality and low price,winning by quantity" has been relied on for a long time,resulting in the improvement of "quality" always lagging behind the growth of "quantity".Therefore,the key for China’s foreign trade to achieve leapfrog development under the dual background of open economy and transition economy is to achieve the goal of "quality power" by constantly improving product quality and added value.At present,only by improving the quality of China enterprises’ export products can we change the current situation that export products are low in price and low in quality,and increase the position of "Made in China" in global competitiveness.As the maker of enterprise’s export strategy,executives’ past background will have a certain impact on export strategy,and it will promote or inhibit the improvement of export product quality.Based on this,the research topic of this paper is the influence of the professional background of executives on the quality of export products.Firstly,by combing the relevant literature at home and abroad,this paper theoretically analyzes the influence mechanism of export strategies adopted by executives with different professional backgrounds on the quality of export products of enterprises,and puts forward research hypotheses;Secondly,the part of model setting and empirical analysis is completed systematically,which mainly includes:The initial research sample is the fourdimensional data set of China Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2000 to 2016,and the quality of Chinese enterprises’ export products is calculated by regression and inverse method,and matching it with China industrial enterprise database,Wind database and CSMAR database;The multiple fixed effect model is used to compare and investigate the influence of export strategies of executives with different professional backgrounds on the quality of export products;Adopting quasi-natural experiments and controlling possible missing variables to overcome endogenous factors;Model replacement,sample replacement and outlier processing are used to test the robustness.Test the intermediary effect of the hypothesis of action mechanism put forward above;Analyze the heterogeneity according to the types of enterprise ownership,technology and market share;Finally,the research conclusions are summarized and corresponding policy suggestions are put forward.The results show that:(1)The greater the proportion of executives with technical background in the top management team,the better the quality of export products,and the greater the proportion of executives with marketing background and financial background,the better the negative effect on the quality of export products;When the proportion of executives with technical background increases,the proportion of other two types of executives with technical background decreases,which magnifies the positive effect of executives with technical background on the quality of export products to a certain extent.The neglect of this point leads to the downward bias of regression results in previous literature.(2)From the result of intermediary mechanism,executives with technical background tend to adopt the decision of applying for patent to realize technological innovation and the decision of new product development to realize product innovation,and both technological innovation and product innovation will bring about the improvement of the quality of export products of enterprises;Executives with marketing background tend to adopt the export strategy of increasing investment in marketing,which leads to crowding out the business cost of products,and then inhibits the improvement of the quality of export products;Executives with financial background will tend to adopt risk-averse export strategies,which will lead to the reduction of R&D investment and ultimately inhibit the improvement of the quality of export products.(3)Heterogeneity analysis of sub-samples shows that executives with technical background can have a significant impact on improving the quality of export products of domestic enterprises,non-high-tech enterprises and large enterprises with high market share;Marketing background executives can significantly improve the quality of export products of foreign-funded enterprises,non-high-tech enterprises and small enterprises with low market share;Financial background executives can promote the export product quality of large enterprises with high market share.The above results are helpful to theoretically answer the long-standing arguments about whether the characteristics of executives’ professional background are important to the quality of export products of enterprises and whether enterprises need to reasonably build management teams,and also provide new evidence support to rationally set up the composition of management teams and select high-level talents.