Britta Glennon

Exequiel Hernandez, Britta Glennon, Francisco Morales, Seth Carnahan, The Unique Blend: Immigrant Talent Combinations and their Impact on Organizational Performance.

Exequiel Hernandez, Britta Glennon, Francisco Morales, Seth Carnahan (2024), Does Employing Skilled Immigrants Enhance Competitive Performance? Evidence from European Football Clubs, Management Science.

Abstract: 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. Detailed microdata from this setting offers unusual transparency on the migration and hiring of talent and their contribution to collective performance. Further, country-level rules govern how immigrant players are defined and the number of immigrant players that 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 find evidence that immigrant players enhance club performance because they exhibit higher individual talent than natives and because they enable their clubs to deploy a wider variety of on-field strategies and actions. The latter mechanism is novel to the literature.

Saerom Lee and Britta Glennon (Under Review), The Effect of Immigration Policy on Founding Location Choice: Evidence from Canada’s Start-up Visa Program.

Abstract: To spur entrepreneurship and economic growth, an increasing number of countries have introduced immigration policies that provide visas to skilled entrepreneurs. This paper investigates whether these policies influence the founding location choice of immigrant founders, by leveraging the introduction of Canada's Start-up Visa Program in 2013. We demonstrate that this immigration policy increased the likelihood that U.S.-based immigrants have a start-up in Canada by 69%. Our results show that Asian immigrants (who have a higher representation in Canada than in the U.S.) are disproportionately more likely to migrate to Canada to start their businesses, whereas Hispanic immigrants (who have a smaller representation in Canada than in the U.S.) are less inclined to do so. We also find that this propensity varies with the size of co-ethnic immigrant communities in the origin location. Overall, our study unveils the importance of immigration policies in determining founding location choice and has important implications for countries competing for global talent.

Britta Glennon, Miguel Garza Casado, Julia Lane, David McQuown, Daniel Rich, Bruce A. Weinberg, The Effect of Fiscal Stimulus: Evidence from COVID-19.

Abstract: Policymakers, faced with different options for replacing lost earnings, have had limited evidence to inform their decisions. The current economic crisis has highlighted the need for data that are local and timely so that different fiscal policy options on local economies can be more immediately evaluated. This paper provides a framework for evaluating real-time effects of fiscal policy on local economic activity using two new sources of near real-time data. The first data source is administrative records that provide universal, weekly, information on unemployment claimants. The second data source is transaction level data on economic activity that are available on a daily basis. We use shift-share approaches, combined with these two data sources and the novel cross-county variation in the incidence of the COVID-19 supplement to Unemployment Insurance to estimate the local impact of unemployment, earnings replacement, and their interaction on economic activity. We find that higher replacement rates lead to significantly more consumer spending – even with increases in the unemployment rate – consistent with the goal of the fiscal stimulus. Our estimates suggest that, based on the latest data, eliminating the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) supplement would lead to a 44% decline in local spending. If the FPUC supplement is reduced to $200, resulting in a reduction of the replacement rate by 44%, spending would fall by 28%. Even if the FPUC supplement is reduced to $400, the replacement rate would fall by 29% and spending would fall by 12%. Because these data are available in every state, the approach can be used to inform decision making not just in this current crisis, but also in future recessions.

Britta Glennon, Prithwiraj Choudhury, Dany Bahar, An Executive Order Worth $100 Billion: The Impact of an Immigration Ban’s Announcement on Fortune 500 Firms’ Valuation.

Abstract: On June 22, 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) that suspended new work visas, barring nearly 200,000 foreign workers and their dependents from entering the United States and preventing American companies from hiring skilled immigrants using H-1B or L1 visas. Exploiting this shock, and using event study methodology analyzing the cumulative average abnormal returns (CAARs) of Fortune 500 companies following this order, we find that the EO statistically and economically significantly caused negative CAARs of up to 0.45%, the equivalent of over 100 billion of US dollars of losses, based on the firms’ valuation before the event. Our results are particularly pronounced for firms that had maintained or increased their reliance on skilled immigrant workers over the prior years.

Lee G. Branstetter, Britta Glennon, J. Bradford Jensen (2019), The IT Revolution and the Globalization of R&D, Innovation Policy and the Economy, 19 (1), pp. 1-37.

Lee G. Branstetter, Britta Glennon, J. Bradford Jensen (2019), The Rise of Global Innovation by US Multinationals Poses Risks and Opportunities, Peterson Institute Policy Brief, 19 (9).

Britta Glennon (Working), How Do Restrictions on High-Skilled Immigration Affect Offshoring? Evidence from the H-1B Program.

Lee G. Branstetter, Jong-Rong Chen, Britta Glennon, Nikolas Zolas (Working), Does offshoring production harm innovation? Firm-level evidence from Taiwan.

Abstract: Does the offshoring of production degrade or enhance the innovative capabilities of manufacturing firms? We contribute to this debate by exploiting a policy shock that differentially affected the ability of Taiwanese firms to offshore some products to China. We find causal evidence that offshoring has a negative effect on innovation in the technologies directly related to the offshored product, and that this negative effect is concentrated in product innovation. However, we also find evidence of a second-order positive effect of offshoring on the levels of innovation in other parts of the firm’s portfolio. These results are consistent with the notion that offshoring production changes the optimal innovation strategy of the firm.

Lee G. Branstetter, Britta Glennon, J. Bradford Jensen (Working), Doing Frontier Innovation in Non-Traditional R&D Locations: Lessons from U.S. Multinational Firms.

Abstract: In recent decades, multinationals have increasingly done R&D in non-traditional R&D destinations, with especially fast growth in emerging markets. This presents a puzzle: R&D is a knowledge-intensive activity, but local knowledge sources in non-traditional locations are often far from the technological frontier. We explain this puzzle by introducing a mechanism by which foreign affiliates can develop their technical capabilities to become active contributors to the multinational’s global innovation effort: utilizing home-based inventors on foreign affiliate inventor teams to facilitate knowledge transfer. Their utilization then declines as local inventors “catch up” technologically. We also provide evidence that the R&D portfolios of multinationals within each country are frequently concentrated in multiple technical areas, so aggregating across different technology areas might hide meaningful variation in firm behavior.