Publications
With Britta Glennon, Seth Carnahan, and Exequiel Hernández. Management Science (Accepted)
We investigate the effect of employing skilled immigrants on the competitive performance of organizations by studying European football (soccer) clubs in Germany, Italy, France, England, and Spain from 1990-2020. Microdata from this setting offers unusual transparency about players’ birthplaces and their contributions to organizational performance. Further, country-level rules govern how many immigrant players clubs can deploy. Using changes to these rules as the basis for instrumental variables, we find that the number of immigrant players in the club’s starting lineup has a positive local average treatment effect on the club’s performance. We show that this occurs for two related reasons. First, immigrants exhibit higher individual talent. Second, immigrants play a coordinating role that enables the organization to broaden the variety of on-field strategies and actions it uses to outperform rivals. The latter mechanism is novel to the literature.
Press coverage: Forbes, Knowledge@Wharton, The Weeds (Vox)
Santiago Mingo and Luciano Ciravegna. International Business Review (2024)
Previous research on cross-border investments has shown the importance of choosing the right focal market—a target country in which a firm invests. International business scholars have also noted that cross-border investments frequently concentrate in regions. However, the factors affecting investment agglomeration within a region have yet to be determined. Building on theoretical insights from the Uppsala internationalization model, we propose two effects that can significantly impact investment agglomeration within a region: (1) the focal effect, linked to cumulative investment experience in a focal market, and (2) the neighborhood effect, related to cumulative investment experience in the region where a focal market is located. We also examine how the size of these effects is moderated by cross-national distance. To test our theoretical arguments, we use a dataset of private equity firms that made investments in three emerging market regions—Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe—from 1996 to 2011. The results support all our hypotheses. We contribute to the literature on regional internationalization by providing new insights that complement the Uppsala internationalization model.
With Jeffrey Reuer, Kun Zhang. Advances in Strategic Management (2020)
Strategy and entrepreneurship scholars have identified many benefits of signaling for new ventures to access resources in financial and other factor markets. However, scholars have not studied the extent to which new ventures can employ signals to hire new talent. This chapter investigates inventor mobility across biopharmaceutical new ventures and examines the effects of two signals, venture capitalist (VC) prominence and alliance network prominence. We suggest that VC prominence and alliance network prominence can provide assurances to prospective employees about a venture's resources and prospects, thereby facilitating inventor mobility owing to enhanced labor market efficiency. Empirical evidence from biopharmaceutical startups shows that new ventures can benefit from signals emanating from their ties to VCs and alliance partners and attract inventors to join them. We also find that these signaling effects attenuate as information asymmetry diminishes.
With Santiago Mingo and Marc Junkunc. Journal of World Business (2018)
This study examines how the interplay between home and host country regulatory institutions affects the investment strategy of private equity (PE) firms in an emerging market context. To answer this question, we consider three different mechanisms: (1) the institutional hazard avoidance effect, (2) the institutional escapism effect, and (3) the dysfunctional institutions effect. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we argue that regulatory institutional differences between home and host countries can sometimes have a positive rather than a negative effect on investment likelihood. Our findings show that when a host emerging market has a strong regulatory institutional system relative to other emerging markets, it is more likely that this country will attract PE investments from firms based in home countries with very strong and very weak institutional systems. The empirical analyses, based on a polynomial specification and a dataset covering more than 300 PE firms that made close to 1500 investment transactions in Latin America during 1996–2011, are consistent with our main theoretical arguments.
With Santiago Mingo and Luis Dau. Journal of International Business Studies (2018)
Integrating social network theory with the literature on national distance, we examine how the investment strategy followed by a private equity (PE) firm in an emerging market is affected by the interplay between two important types of national distances – institutional and geographic – and the firm’s centrality in the regional syndication network. Covering over 5,000 investment transactions, we use a dataset of more than 500 PE firms based in both developed and emerging markets targeting three emerging market regions – Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe – from 1996 to 2011. The results show that, depending on the level of centrality of PE firms in regional syndication networks, institutional and geographic distances can have differing effects – both in magnitude and direction – on their investment strategies in emerging markets. Moreover, these effects are contingent on whether the PE firm is from a developed market or an emerging market. We conclude that different types of national distances can operate in dissimilar ways depending on (1) firm-level factors defined at the regional level – such as centrality in the regional syndication network – and (2) the developed market or emerging market nature of the PE firm.