Highly-skilled migrants and Cross-border M&A: Firm-level evidence

Based on a relational view of international business, we investigate the role of migrant inventors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions undertaken by R&D-active firms. We hypothesize that the migrant inventors’ international social networks can be leveraged by their employers in order to ide...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of international business studies 2020-07, Vol.51 (5)
Main Authors: Lissoni, F., Useche, D., Miguelez, E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business administration
Economics and Finance
Humanities and Social Sciences
Quantitative Finance
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Based on a relational view of international business, we investigate the role of migrant inventors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions undertaken by R&D-active firms. We hypothesize that the migrant inventors’ international social networks can be leveraged by their employers in order to identify and/or integrate relevant knowledge bases of acquisition targets in the inventors’ home country. We nuance our hypothesis by means of several conditional logistic regressions on a large matched sample of deals and control cases. The impact of migrant inventors increases with the distance between countries and for targets located in countries with weak administrative/legal systems, as well as when targets are either innovative or belong to high-tech sectors or to the same sector as the acquirer, and for full versus partial acquisitions.
ISSN:0047-2506
1478-6990
DOI:10.1057/s41267-018-0203-3