Globalisation and Corporate Organisational Change: Cross-Country Panel Evidence from Managerial Boards

Title: Globalisation and Corporate Organisational Change: Cross-Country Panel Evidence from Managerial Boards

Abstract: Globalisation shocks like the opening of China and the integration of Eastern Europe are thought to have shaped firm organisation over the last decades, but evidence transcending individual episodes in single countries is rare. To make progress, we build a novel firm-level panel dataset for North America, Europe, and the UK that features information on decision-making authority. We use the composition of managerial boards as a metric for centralisation of responsibilities and relate it to proxies for import competition, export demand, and offshoring opportunity shocks. Preliminary findings suggest that increased openness has had profound effects on the allocation of power within companies, but there were marked disparities in organisational restructuring responses to the same shocks across North American and European firms.