Drawing from the literature on entrepreneurial overconfidence and M&As, we argue that founder CEO-managed firms perform worse than professional CEO-managed firms when they participate in M&A transactions. We test our predictions using a sample of acquisitions by newly listed US public firms from...

Private equity backed firms have more leverage, more intense compensation contracts, and higher productivity than comparable non-private equity backed firms. We develop a theory of buyouts in oligopolistic markets that ties these facts to an explicit focus on buying assets with the intent of...

We study the recent episode of bank failures and provide simple facts to better understand who acquires failed banks and which forces drive the losses that the FDIC realizes from these sales. We document three distinct forces related to the allocation of failed banks to potential acquirers....

Separating the value-increasing takeovers from the value-decreasing takeovers is the ideal goal in designing the legal rule on takeovers. The previous studies showed that the Mandatory Bid Rule stops all of the inefficient sales of corporate control. However, this paper, by using the negative...

We show that the allocation of failed banks in the Great Recession was likely distorted because potential acquirers of these banks were poorly capitalized. We illustrate this phenomenon within a model of auctions with budget constraints. In our model poor capitalization of some potential...

Reverse leveraged buyouts (RLBOs) have received increased public scrutiny but attracted little systematic study. We collect a comprehensive sample of 496 RLBOs between 1980 and 2002 and examine three- and five-year stock performance of these offerings. RLBOs appear to consistently outperform...