Firms' global engagement and management practices

•We use new and unique data from a recent large scale firm survey of management practices in Germany (GMOP).•We calculate management scores for firms which indicate how structured management is in a given firm.•We find that switching into exporting, and to a lesser degree opening up affiliates abroad, is related to improving management performance in the sense of firms applying more structured management practices.

We investigate whether firms' “global engagement”, either in the form of exporting or opening up affiliates abroad, is related to the change in their management performance. Using new and unique data from a recent large scale firm survey of management practices in Germany, we calculate management scores for firms as in Bloom et al. (2013). These indicate how structured management is in a given firm. We find that switching into exporting, and to a lesser degree opening up affiliates abroad, is related to improving management performance in the sense of firms applying more structured management practices.