Britta Glennon
Assistant Professor, Wharton School of Business
Britta Glennon is an Assistant Professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, an NBER Faculty Research Fellow, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She is an Associate Editor at Management Science (Strategy). Her research investigates where innovation happens, why, and how immigration policy, geopolitics, and firm strategy shape the global geography of talent and innovation. Her work has been published in leading academic journals including Management Science and Nature, and has been featured in prominent media outlets such as the New York Times, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal.
Professor Glennon has testified as an expert witness before the U.S. Senate, and her research has been cited in Congressional testimony, informing critical policy debates on immigration and innovation.
In the News
Recent media coverage, policy testimony, and public commentary on immigration, innovation, and firm strategy.
Will the $100,000 Visa Fee Help U.S. Workers? Economists Aren't So Sure
Trump's H-1B visa crackdown could cut US jobs instead of creating them
Featured Research
Research exploring the intersection of immigration policy, global innovation, and firm strategy, with implications for policymakers and business leaders.
Does Offshoring Manufacturing Harm Innovation? Firm-level Evidence from Taiwan
Management Science (2026)
Uses a Taiwanese policy shock to show that offshoring production reduces innovation in the offshored product categories, but redirects research resources toward other parts of the firm's R&D portfolio — evidence that firms actively reallocate, rather than simply lose, innovative capacity when production moves abroad.
How Do Restrictions on High-Skilled Immigration Affect Offshoring?
Management Science (2024)
Shows that H-1B visa restrictions caused U.S. multinationals to increase foreign affiliate employment — concentrated in China, India, and Canada — identifying immigration restrictions as a previously overlooked push factor for offshoring knowledge work.
Does Employing Skilled Immigrants Enhance Competitive Performance?
Management Science (2025)
Using European football clubs, shows that each additional immigrant player raises win probability by roughly 30% relative to the mean. Two mechanisms drive the effect: positive selection from a global talent pool, and that immigrants enable greater strategic variety within the organization.
Women are Credited Less in Science than are Men
Nature (2022)
Uses administrative data on nearly 10,000 research teams to show that women are 13% less likely to receive authorship credit and 58% less likely to be named on patents than men, even controlling for role, field, and hours worked.
Skilled Immigrants, Firms, and the Global Geography of Innovation
Journal of Economic Perspectives (2024)
Comprehensive survey examining how skilled immigration policies shape the global geography and quality of innovation, emphasizing the central role firms play in the immigration process and the implications for international competitiveness.
Building a Wall Around Science
NBER Working Paper
Documents that rising U.S.-China tensions caused a ~15% drop in Chinese students entering U.S. PhD programs and an 8–11% productivity decline for U.S.-based ethnically Chinese researchers — a chilling effect extending well beyond any formal policy.
Teaching
Courses exploring multinational management, international trade, and the role of firms in the global economy.
Multinational Management
Most successful firms go global in some way; why do they go global, and how do they navigate across international borders? Topics include the returns and costs to trade, tariffs and non-tariff barriers, trade wars, taxation and tax havens, IP, ethics, geopolitics, and the role of diasporas and migration in driving multinational strategy.
Multinational Firms in the Global Economy
This graduate course focuses on the empirical aspects of multinational firms and international trade, familiarizing students with empirical work on multinational firms in the global economy. Topics include patterns in the expansion of multinational firms, horizontal and vertical multinationals, linkages between openness to trade and investment and growth, technology transfer and spillovers, innovation and productivity, immigration, labor markets, and politics.