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). Her research focuses on immigration and cross-border innovation, exploring how immigration policy shapes the global geography of talent, innovation, and firm strategy. 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.
How Do Restrictions on High-Skilled Immigration Affect Offshoring?
Management Science (2024)
Evidence that restricting H-1Bs leads multinationals to offshore jobs, with particularly significant increases in foreign affiliate employment in Canada, India, and China.
Does Employing Skilled Immigrants Enhance Competitive Performance?
Management Science (2025)
Evidence from European football clubs demonstrating that hiring skilled immigrant employees positively impacts organizational performance. We show that this occurs for two related reasons. First, immigrants exhibit higher individual talent. Second, immigrants play a coordinating role that enables the organization to broaden the variety of on-field strategies and actions it uses to outperform rivals.
Women are Credited Less in Science than are Men
Nature (2022)
Large-scale analysis revealing that women in research teams are significantly less likely to be credited with authorship than men across scientific fields and career stages, suggesting systematic underrecognition of women's contributions.
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
Examining the impact of U.S.-China tensions on international scientific research, including STEM trainee mobility, usage of scientific works, and researcher productivity, revealing a "chilling effect" for ethnically Chinese scholars in the U.S.
The Effect of Immigration Policy on Founding Location Choice
Working Paper
Evidence from Canada's Start-up Visa Program showing that immigration policies significantly influence where immigrant entrepreneurs choose to locate their startups, with important implications for countries competing for global talent.
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.