We study the role of private equity firms in cross-border mergers and acquisitions. We find that private equity-owned firms are more likely to become targets in crossborderM&A transactions. This effect is particularly strong in transactions where the target or its shareholders actively reach out...

See also the article 'Mean and bold: on separating merger economies from structural efficiency gains in the drinking water sector' 2010, <I>The Journal of the Operational Research Society</I>, 61, 222-34.<P> The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly,...</p></i>

Do shareholders of acquiring companies profit from acquisitions, or do acquiring CEOs overbidand destroy shareholder value? Answering this question is difficult since the hypotheticalcounterfactual is hard to determine. We exploit merger contests to address the identificationissue. In those...

I study a model of market-liquidity provision by levered intermediaries that, besides operating trading desks, run deposit-taking franchises. Levered intermediaries’ heightened incentive to absorb risk helps to counteract liquidity-provision frictions that, in an unlevered economy, would lead...

We illustrate the impact of detailed data in empirical economic research by considering how the increased data availability has changed the scope and focus of studies on retail gasoline pricing. We show how high-volume, high-frequency price data help to identify and explain long-term trends...

The paper seeks to explain the huge cross country variation in private pension funding,shaped by historical choice made when universal pension systems were created after theGreat Depression. According to Perotti and von Thadden (2006), large inflationaryshocks due to war damage devastated middle...

This study presents a dynamic model for the private equity market in which information revelation and uncertainty rationally explain the cyclical pattern of investment flows into private equity. The net benefit of private equity over public equity is i) uncertain and ii) agents have private...

We argue in favour of the shareholder model of the firm for three main reasons. First, serving multiple stakeholders leads to ill-defined property rights. What sounds like a fair compromise between stakeholders can easily evolve in a permanent struggle between the stakeholders about the ultimate...

We apply utility indifference pricing to solve a contingent claim problem, valuing a connected pair of gas fields where the underlying process is not standard Geometric Brownian motion and the assumption of complete markets is not fulfilled. First, empirical data are often characterized by...

This paper uses a unified treatment of real options and game theory to examine value appropriation in takeovers within a competitive environment of imperfect information. The integrated model considers a potential target as a shared real option on a bundle of resources. Competing potential...