Journal of International Business Studies Vol. 51 No. 5 2020
Highly skilled and well connected: Migrant inventors in cross-border M&As
Abstract
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.
- DOI
- 10.1057/s41267-018-0203-3
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 737-763
- Language
- en
- Sources
- openalex ris:jibs.ris openalex crossref