There is diverging empirical evidence on the competitive effects of horizontal mergers: consumer prices (and thus presumably competitors' profits) often rise while competitors' share prices fall. Our model of endogenous mergers provides a possible reconciliation. It is demonstrated that...

Using event studies we find statistically and economically significant, negative daily abnormal stock market returns prior to sovereign debt rating downgrade announcements. Instrumental variable techniques show that these findings are more pronounced in countries with lower institutional...

This Paper studies the relationship between civil war and private investment in a poor, resource abundant country using microeconomic data for Angola. We focus on diamond mining firms and conduct an event study on the sudden end of the conflict, marked by the death of the rebel movement leader...

Most empirical studies that evaluate motives and gains in M&A conclude that acquirers at best do not lose from the deal while targets obtain positive gains. With a database containing merging firms’ characteristics and final bids, we propose a structural approach to infer acquirers’ gains...

The average firm going public or issuing new equity underperforms the market in the long run. A potential explanation of this long-run underperformance has to do with the endogeneity of the number of new issues. That is, due to the clustering of events after periods of high abnormal returns in...

We estimate, using event study techniques, the impact of the main events in an antitrust investigation on a firm’s stock market value. A surprise inspection at the firm’s premises has a strong and statistically significant effect on the firm’s share price, with its cumulative average...

This review paper articulates the relationship between prediction market data and event studies, with a special focus on applications in political economy. Event studies have been used to address a variety of political economy questions from the economic effects of party control of government to...

Three mutually uncorrelated economic disturbances that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. A model is employed to interpret these disturbances in terms of three latent primitive shocks. In the short run, shocks that affect the...

Market thinness can be an important determinant of the riskiness of stock returns, because it reduces the reliability of stock prices as predictors of future dividends. This paper analyses the relationship between market size and risk as the outcome of rational expectations equilibrium in a...

Thin equity markets cannot accommodate temporary bulges of buy or sell orders without large price movements: the resulting volatility can induce risk-averse transactors who face transaction costs to desert these markets altogether. Thus thinness and the consequent price volatility may become...