The imprinting effect of CEO early life poverty experience on corporate international expansion: Empirical insights from an emerging economy

The literature has widely suggested that individuals’ early life experiences shape their personalities, values, and work styles in various ways. We draw on imprinting theory to develop a set of competing hypotheses, investigating how a chief executive officer (CEO)’s early life poverty experience influences the firm’s international expansion and the boundary conditions of this relationship. Employing fixed effects models on panel data from listed Chinese manufacturers between 2018 and 2022, we find a negative relationship between CEO early life poverty experience and the firm’s international expansion. In addition, the results show that the negative imprinting influence of the CEO’s early life poverty experience can be mitigated by CEO age, top management team age, and CEO pay, but not CEO financial management background. The results consistently hold across various robustness tests. Overall, our study contributes to the literature by clarifying the imprinting effect of CEO early life poverty experience in future international expansion, and the empirical findings offer useful practical implications.