“Noon Sunshine-Young Scholars Seminar” is a regular academic exchange platform held by School of Finance. It aims to offer valuable occasions of communications among scholars in our college, between teachers and students, the domestic and the oversea. In this semester, we keep our original intention, set off for a new voyage. We will devote ourselves to fostering the academic atmosphere in the college, and promoting the academic level for both teachers and students.

The first session of “Noon Sunshine-Young Scholars Seminar” for the Spring Semester in 2025 is arranged as follows:

Lecture topic

Native-Immigrant Entrepreneurial Synergies

Keynote Speaker: Jin Zhao

Date

Thursday, March 13th, 2025

Time

12:00-13:30

Lecture Venue

Room 116, School of Finance

Abstract

We examine the performance of startups co-founded by immigrant and native entrepreneur teams. Using a unique dataset linking startups to the employment and education histories of its founders and employees, we find that native-migrant teams tend to outperform their native-only and migrant-only counterparts, being 20% larger in employment three years post-inception, more likely to secure funding, accessing larger funding rounds, and more likely to achieve a successful exit. To establish causality, we employ an instrumental variables strategy that leverages the native share in university degree programs attended by native startup founders. Our 2SLS findings indicate that startups with native-migrant teams are approximately 44% larger and 36% more likely to receive funding than native-only startups. We explore mechanisms driving this outperformance, identifying access to a diverse labor pool, foreign investors, and overseas markets as key factors.