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 Merger & Acquisitions (CBM&As) undertaken by R&D-active firms. We hypothesize that the migrant inventors’ international social networks can be leveraged upon by their employers in order to spot and/or integrate the 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.