@article{hernandez_kulchina_2020, title={Immigrants and Foreign Firm Performance}, volume={31}, ISSN={["1047-7039"]}, DOI={10.1287/orsc.2019.1331}, abstractNote={ Studies have demonstrated that foreign firms locate where immigrants from their home countries reside and have suggested that doing so can improve performance. We argue that to properly assess how immigrants impact the performance of co-national firms, research must account for heterogeneity in how independent foreign firms (owned by individual foreigners) versus multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries (owned by a foreign corporate parent) benefit from immigrant communities. Independent firms have a greater need for resources from the immigrant community and depend more on their individual managers’ personal connections within the community to obtain such resources. Subsidiaries of MNCs can instead rely on the impersonal organizational resources of their parent firm (e.g., brand, reputation, channels) to access valuable immigrant community resources. Using data on foreign firms in Russia during 2006–2011, we find that immigrants improve the profitability of co-national independent firms only if they are managed by immigrant chief executive officers (CEOs), whereas co-national MNC subsidiaries profit from immigrants regardless of their CEOs’ nationality. Our study suggests that although organizations benefit from the resources of co-national immigrant communities in foreign markets, the means by which they activate them—personal or impersonal—systematically vary across different types of firms. }, number={4}, journal={ORGANIZATION SCIENCE}, author={Hernandez, Exequiel and Kulchina, Elena}, year={2020}, pages={797–820} }
 @article{kulchina_oxley_2020, title={Relational Contracts and Managerial Delegation: Evidence from Foreign Entrepreneurs in Russia}, volume={31}, ISSN={["1047-7039"]}, DOI={10.1287/orsc.2019.1329}, abstractNote={ We examine the managerial delegation decisions of foreign entrepreneurs and assess how these decisions are shaped by characteristics of the local product and labor market environment. We argue that actual or perceived home bias in court proceedings leads foreign entrepreneurs to place little reliance on formal contracts in their dealings with local agent-managers. Adopting the lens of relational contract theory, we develop hypotheses linking managerial delegation decisions to market conditions associated with stable self-enforcing agreements and test the hypotheses in the context of post-Soviet Russia. Consistent with our arguments, we find that foreign entrepreneurs are more likely to hire an agent-manager in local markets where industry growth creates a substantial “shadow of the future,” where managers’ outside employment options are relatively limited, and where competition and the variability of returns are not so high as to induce defection from an informal agreement. Similar observations on a sample of Russian-owned entrepreneurial firms suggest that these delegation decisions are relatively insensitive to local market conditions but that they are influenced by the density of local reputation networks. Our study thus contributes to understanding of the distinctive features of foreign entrepreneurs’ managerial delegation decisions and reinforces the view that contracting impediments constitute one important aspect of the “liability of foreignness” for entrepreneurial firms. }, number={3}, journal={ORGANIZATION SCIENCE}, author={Kulchina, Elena and Oxley, Joanne}, year={2020}, pages={628–648} }