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

Diego Useche (1) , Ernest Miguelez (2, 3) , Francesco Lissoni (2, 4)

1 CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management
2 GREThA - Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée
3 UB - Universitat de Barcelona
4 Università Bocconi

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.

Mots clés: cross-border mergers and acquisitions; migration; inventors; PCT patents

Domaines: Economies et finances; Gestion et management; Économie et finance quantitative [q-fin]

Diego Useche, Ernest Miguelez, Francesco Lissoni. Highly-skilled migrants and Cross-border M&A: Firm-level evidence. Journal of International Business Studies, 2020, 51, pp.737-763. ⟨10.1057/s41267-018-0203-3⟩. ⟨halshs-02024499⟩