Research Spotlight: Immigrants and Foreign Firm Performance

Welcome back to Research Spotlight, a Datapoints series highlighting research emerging from Wharton that has employed library resources. The fourth installment features an article co-authored by Management faculty member Exequiel Hernandez titled “Immigrants and Foreign Firm Performance,” published in Organization Science 31 (4).

Studies have indicated that foreign firms identify regions where immigrants from their home country reside and use that information to improve performance. The article argues that in order to properly measure the impact of immigrants on performance, there must be a distinguishment between how independent foreign firms and multinational corporations benefit from immigrant communities. To test their hypothesis, the authors obtained firm-level data on foreign firms in Russia from the Ruslana database, which is a part of Orbis, one of a collection of products from Bureau van Dijk (BvD). Orbis integrates data from all of the BvD suite, providing detailed information on over 400 million companies, including financials, M&A activity, risk analysis and more.

For more information on Orbis, please contact a Lippincott librarian.

Wide open SPAC-es: researching Special Purpose Acquisition Companies

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are having a moment. Also known as “blank check” companies, they allow investors to raise funding to acquire a company before the target has been identified.

It seems like every advisory firm or consulting company has a SPAC-oriented site, including those from Deloitte, KPMG and PwC to name a few. Interest in SPACs on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus has been strong enough to inspire Penn undergraduates to create the Penn SPAC Club.