Collaborate at Home to Win Abroad: How Does Access to Local Network Resources Influence Export Behavior?

Abstract

By drawing on the resource-based view and on elements from social network theory, we use a sample of southern Brazilian small and medium-sized furniture manufacturers to find evidence for the hypothesis that access to local network resources, facilitated by a firm’s membership in an industry association, strongly predicts the propensity to export. Likewise, we find that a firm’s local collaborative intensity is positively related to its export intensity and that both relations are moderated by the firm’s distance from the local network’s center. This study contributes to the literature on how local collaboration may facilitate overcoming export barriers.