Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

Do Retail Stores Benefit from Headquarter Site Visits? Knowledge Exchange and Knowledge Spillover Effects

• In Event: Spillover Effects

Abstract

We examine the impacts of site visits by principals on unit managers’ performance. Site visits are important tools for firms to acquire information on local conditions and unit managers’ behaviors. To enhance our understanding of site visits, we exploit a field setting where the firm introduces management site visits to their practices and site visits are decided on a random basis. We expect that site visits enhance knowledge exchange between principals and unit managers, and promote knowledge spillover among peers, which help unit managers improve management practices and hence their performance. We find that site visits are associated with higher sales growth rate, and site visits to peers also positively influence focal stores’ sales growth. Furthermore, the effects of site visits to peers on focal stores’ performance are stronger where knowledge spillover is easier to occur, such as regions where stores are geographically closer and where no new managers join the group.

Authors

• Peter Kroos, University of Amsterdam

• Jan Bouwens, University of Amsterdam

• Jingwen Zhang, Erasmus University

• Nan Jiang, Pompeu Fabra University