The use of judgmental anchors or reference points in valuing corporations affects several basic aspects of merger and acquisition activity including offer prices, deal success, market reaction, and merger waves. Offer prices are biased towards the 52-week high, a highly salient but largely...

We analyze how entrepreneurial opportunity cost conditions performance. We depart from the literature on entrepreneurship which identifies survival with performance. Instead, many entrepreneurs aim for a cash-out (IPO or acquisition), especially in innovation based industries. Striving for a...

Using U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data for individual foreign acquisitions and new establishments in the U.S from 1988 to 1998, and aggregate data for 1980 to 1998, we find that acquisitions and establishments of new firms tend to occur in periods of high U.S. growth and take place mainly...

This paper examines the recent upsurge in foreign acquisitions of U.S. firms, specifically focusing on acquisitions made by firms located in emerging markets. Neoclassical theory predicts that, on net, capital should flow from countries that are capital-abundant to countries that are...

We study the interplay between corporate liquidity and asset reallocation opportunities. Our model shows that financially distressed firms are acquired by liquid firms in their industries even when there are no operational synergies associated with the merger. We call these transactions...

Using a sample of control cross-border acquisitions from 61 countries from 1990 to 2007, we find that acquirers from countries with better governance gain more from such acquisitions and their gains are higher when targets are from countries with worse governance. Other acquirer country...

The federal government stands poised to exercise its constitutional right to regulate financial markets, an area traditionally left to competing provincial securities commissions. The current state of securities regulation renders impotent US-style takeover defences, such as poison pills and...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that uncontrolled managers let wages rise above competitive levels. Testing this popular perception has proven difficult, however, because independent variation in the extent of managerial discretion is needed. In this paper, we use states' passage of anti-takeover...

This paper explores the impact of target CEOs' retirement preferences on the incidence, the pricing, and the outcomes of takeover bids. Mergers frequently force target CEOs to retire early, and CEOs' private merger costs are the forgone benefits of staying employed until the planned retirement...

This paper studies the effect of stock liquidity on blockholders' choice of governance mechanisms. We focus on hedge funds as they are unconstrained by legal restrictions and business ties, and thus have all governance channels at their disposal. Since the threat of governance, not just actual...