Preparing for export opportunities
研究企业如何通过招聘有出口经验的工人来应对出口机会，发现企业集中招聘熟练蓝领专家，并在出口预期落空时解雇他们。
This paper investigates how firms prepare their workforce to export. We employ a novel identification strategy to isolate how a firm's hiring decision at home responds to export opportunities that arise from exogenous changes to product demand abroad. Combining Brazilian exporter and linked employer–employee data, we show that firms act on better chances to export by hiring workers with prior experience at exporting firms. We find that firms concentrate this preparatory hiring of experts in skilled blue-collar occupations and that firms separate from the previously hired experts when the predicted export-market participation fails to materialize. The evidence is consistent with the tenet that a few exporting experts in select occupations shape a firm's competitive advantage.