The Internationalization of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises: the Effect of Family Management, Human Capital and Foreign Ownership

This paper focuses on factors affecting the internationalization of SMEs. Based on both international businessand and family business literatures, we develop three hypotheses that relate the internationalization of SMEs’ to familymanagement, human capital, and presence of foreign shareholders. Relying on data from a large sample of Italian manufacturing SMEs, we find that involvement of the owning family in management negatively influences export propensity but, once the choice to gointernational has been made, the degree of internationalization of the firm is not significantly different with respect to the composition of the management team. Our results also show that the level of human capital and the presence of foreign shareholders in the SME positively influence both export propensity and export intensity. Size and age of the firm as well as industry characteristics are included in the empirical analysis as control variables.