How Do Local Knowledge Spillovers and Experience Affect Export Performance?

This research paper tries to analyse the role that knowledge about foreign markets has in increasing firms' exports in clustered spaces. We consider two interrelated sources of this knowledge, a firm's direct experience and its indirect experience from other clustered firms. In particular, it is proposed that firms can improve their export performance by accessing others' knowledge as long as they have some previous direct experience that allows them to identify, understand and exploit these. Nevertheless, this positive influence of previous direct experience on exports continues only to a certain point, at which time it becomes less relevant or even negative. Firms with broad international experience have little to learn from local interactions, being more enriching establishing relationships with agents from outside the cluster. Empirical evidence gathered from wine producers located in La Rioja, Spain, confirms the moderating but decreasing importance of previous experience.