Center for Global Business Awards 2021 PhD International Research Award

The Center for Global Business announces that Roxanne Jaffe, a doctoral candidate in the department of management and organization, has received the 2021 PhD International Research Award. The award is funded by CIBE, a Title VI grant administered by the U.S. Department of Education to support research in international business.

Now in its eighth year, the award supports doctoral candidates doing research on international topics. An important goal of the center is to encourage doctoral candidates to do research in global business and offset the significant costs that such research often entails. In regard to this year’s award to Jaffe, Kislaya Prasad, academic director of the center, remarked that “The center is very pleased to make this award to Roxanne Jaffe. Her work promises to provide new insights into questions such as: 'When should firms enter foreign countries?'; 'When do firms enter a location early, before their competition?' and 'When do firms enter a location later, after their competition?'”

Jaffe joined the University of Maryland’s doctoral program in fall 2016. Her research interests include global strategy, location choice, and international business, from an economics perspective. Prior to joining the managerial economics program at UMD, she worked on fair lending litigation and regulatory cases as an analyst in the financial economics group at Charles River Associates.

“Businesses constantly face strategic choices that have the potential to improve productivity, profitability, or other firm performance. One such strategic choice is the location and entry order of expansion abroad—a complex decision, depending on the traits of locations, such as the 'liability of foreignness', firms, and their competitors,” Jaffe said about her research. “Much of the empirical efforts on entry order and foreign expansion focus on well-developed industries such as automotive, airline, and semiconductor, with less attention on newer industries including those with a large start-up presence, or those providing services. Yet, these firms internationalize too, partly because of increased venture capital funding in the past two decades, and due to new technology, such as the increased quality and availability of apps and platform services. One such industry is micro-mobility, including electric scooter and bike-share firms. In my dissertation, I study firm expansion decisions using both analytical math modeling and empirical techniques. With the help of the CIBE award, I will collect international data on micro-mobility expansion behavior, to better understand firm internationalization in new industries,” she shared.

The Center for Global Business funds PhD research that aligns with the congressionally mandated CIBE mission of contributing to the internationalization of business disciplines and/or the global competitiveness of U.S. businesses.

- By Terqueasha Wooten, graduate assistant, Center for Global Business