CEO’s international education experience and hospital performance：empirical evidence in China

Abstract Background –Previous researches have recognized the importance of hospital CEO’s tenure, age, gender for health system, whether and how CEOs’ international education experience(IEE) benefit the hospitals’ performance has been relatively unexplored. This study proposes to investigate the effect of CEOs’ IEE on hospital performance. We hypothesize that IEE improves individuals’ cognitive ability and enhances their professional knowledge, which is essential in hospital management. Methods - We test these relationships using 393 hospital-year from 2009 to 2017. Our study relies on both archival (e.g., Health Statistics Yearbook of Municipal Commission of Health) and hand-collected (e.g., CEO characteristics) data. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models are used to estimate the relationship between hospital CEOs’ IEE and hospital performance. Propensity scores match (PSM) is used to address the potential endogeneity issues. Results - We find a positive association between CEO’s IEE and hospital performance. However, due to the differences in philosophy and treatment methods between Western medicine and traditional medicine, the benefits of CEOs with IEE are less pronounced for TCM hospitals. Conclusions -Since CEOs with IEE has considerable advantages in hospital management, we suggest that hospitals can encourage talent exchanges and construct diversified manager teams. To our best knowledge, we are the first to document a positive relationship between a hospital CEO’s IEE and hospital performance. Our finding enriches the research of hospital performance and extends the Upper Echelon Theory into the domain of hospital performance.