Luna Yang, assistant professor of business at Penn State Brandywine, has recently received a $10,000 research grant from the Academy of International Business, writes Christina Billie for Penn State Brandywine.

The grant will fund an international study on companies with sites in multiple countries, examining how they invest in natural resources in under-resourced countries.

She will specifically focus on resources that are at high risk of opportunism, or taking of resources without consideration of potential harms, and expropriation, when the private property is seized for public use. 

“I’m really excited about doing this research because I’ve been interested in countries that are, historically, at an economic disadvantage, especially countries in Africa, the Middle East and West Asia,” she said. “Those countries have abundant natural resources, but they haven’t had the opportunity to develop their country enough to appropriate and benefit from those natural resources. … This research will give us a better understanding of why these countries have been plagued by this resource curse from the lens of foreign investment in natural resources sectors.

“We’ll also investigate the unique patterns of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) transaction-specific investment in extractive sectors under high risk of opportunism.”

The research grant was submitted in a collaborative effort with universities worldwide, including Kent State University, Ohio State University, Covenant University of Nigeria and Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. Yang credited a grant proposal writing boot camp hosted at Penn State Behrend in 2023 for motivating her to pursue external grants.

“During the boot camp, I was working with Lisa Wiedemer, former manager of grant relations at Penn State, who shared her experiences and guided me in grant proposal writing,” she said. “I’m excited to have the opportunity to refine my initial idea and turn it into something more impactful by theorizing the underlying mechanisms that guide firms’ overseas investments. It was a team effort.”

In addition to her international collaborators, Yang plans to hire a student researcher to assist with data collection and analysis.

“My student researcher will gain valuable hands-on experience with data analysis. If they are in the honors college, they can also use this research setting to develop their own thesis,” she said.

Yang’s research will begin in the fall of 2024 and last until mid-spring 2025. She said the final report will be completed by summer 2025 at the earliest.

The Academy of International Business is a nonprofit whose mission is to promote impactful research, improve business education and practice, and collaborate with leaders in policy and interdisciplinary research.