of employees. Schooling is the employees’ average years of schooling.<sup>24</sup> “Wage” is the average monthly wage by firm. This information is available in current domestic currency and it was converted to Reais (R$) of 2010.<sup>25</sup> As it is known from trade literature (see Roberts and Tybout (1997), Bernard and Jensen (2004), Melitz and Trefler (2012)), exporting firms are larger, older, employ more educated workers and pay higher wages.<sup>26</sup> If we compare them with Apex’s treated firms we can see that their characteristics concerning these variables are much closer to exporters than to the average manufacturing firm.<sup>27</sup> This finding reinforces some potential selection issues to identify the impact of the program.

Another variable that tries to capture time-varying information on management quality is a dummy identifying firms that hired workers from other exporting firms in Management positions. In order to create this variable I used a unique worker identifier (RAIS at employee level) that allows for the tracking of a worker over time.<sup>28</sup> Firstly, I identify employees working in an exporting firm _i_ at period _t-1_ that were not working in the same firm at period _t_ . Then I check the firm they were working at period _t_ and based on their CBO classification (Portuguese acronym for Brazilian Classification of Occupation) I classified them as managers according to different layers.<sup>29</sup> Based on this information, I generated three dummy variables (at firm level) that take the value 1 when a firm _k_ at period _t_ hired an employee who was working at an exporting firm _i_ at period _t-1_ . This procedure is in line with the findings of Mion and Opromolla (2011), who show that hiring an employee with previous experience in exporting firms impacts the probability of export, but only if she has a management position. This also can be considered as a proxy for an effort from the firm towards having access to the foreign market. Again for these variables the Apex-treated firms are more similar to the average exporting firms.

Also, Caliendo and Rossi-Hansberg (2012) and Caliendo et al. (2012) show that the organization of firms under a form of hierarchies based on knowledge matters on their performance and export status. In order to capture this information I build a similar variable using the CBO classification. Firms are divided in five layers that represent different levels of management hi-

> 24In RAIS, education attainment is a categorical information that is converted to years of schooling based on a methodology available on the PNAD (National Household Sample Survey) carried by the IBGE (Portuguese acronym for Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).

> 25In order to convert the annual value to 2010 I used the IPCA-IBGE (Consumer Price Index produced by IBGE used by the Brazilian Central Bank as official reference to inflation target). The exchange rate in December 2010 was approximately R$ 1.00 for US$ 1.67 (source: Central Bank of Brazil).

> 26These findings in Brazil are highlighted by Kannebley Jr et al. (2009).

> 27It is even more similar when we compare with treated firms excluding Peiex-treated firms, which are smaller

> 28The identifier I used to track workers is available from 2006.

> 29These variables are respectively called Manager exp L1, Manager exp L2 and Manager exp L3, which corresponds to the following occupations: CEOs and directors (L1), senior staff with higher level of experience (L2) and supervisors (L3).

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