Reading the City: Urban Sentiment, Technological Disruption, and the Exporting and Performance of High-Growth Firms in China

High-growth firms are disproportionately responsible for job creation and productivity gains in emerging economies, yet little is known about how the urban environments in which they operate shape their decisions to sell abroad and the returns they earn from doing so. Integrating real options reasoning with an institution-based view of urban task environments, we argue that city-level sentiment about economic development and technological disruption functions as a collective signal that shapes how high-growth firms value and exploit international opportunities. We combine a simulated firm-level survey dataset calibrated to the World Bank Enterprise Survey design for 25 Chinese cities (N = 2,700 firms; 540 high-growth firms) with city-industry sentiment scores produced through large language model text classification. Economic development sentiment is positively associated with export intensity, whereas technological disruption sentiment displays an inverted U-shaped relationship with export intensity. Exporting is associated with higher productivity and growth, but these returns are amplified by favorable development sentiment and attenuated by intense disruption sentiment. A multiverse analysis of 72 specifications supports the robustness of the core moderation result. The study advances research on emerging-market internationalization, high-growth entrepreneurship, and text-based measurement in international business.