We examine chief executive officer (CEO) career and compensation changes for large firms filing for Chapter 11. One-third of the incumbent CEOs maintain executive employment, and these CEOs experience a median compensation change of zero. However, incumbent CEOs leaving the executive labor...

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 marked a significant change in U.S. domestic and international tax policy, altering incentives for U.S. firms to own foreign assets. We examine the initial response of U.S. firms’ foreign acquisition patterns to the TCJA’s key reform provisions. We...

We examine the relation between venture capital (VC) investments, M&A activity, and merger competition laws in 48 countries around the world. We find evidence of a strong positive association between VC investments and lagged M&A activity, consistent with the hypothesis that an active M&A market...

Do pre-offer target stock price runups increase bidder takeover costs? We present model-based tests of this issue assuming runups are caused by signals that inform investors about potential takeover synergies. Rational deal anticipation implies a relation between target runups and markups (offer...

I review recent takeover research which advances our understanding of "who buys who" in the drive for productive efficiency. This research provides detailed information on text-based definitions of product market links between bidders and targets, the role of the supply chain and industrial...

The more the target knows about the bidder, the more difficult it is to pay with overpriced shares. Thus, under bidder opportunism, the fraction of stock in the deal payment is lower with better informed targets. We test this simple prediction using information proxies reflecting industry...

Largely constant average acquirer returns over the past four decades mask fundamental changes in the takeover market. Controlling for bidder composition, the common component of acquirer returns has increased by five percentage points relative to the 1980s. Offsetting this increase, the average...

We adjust the US stock-exchange listing count for all significant transactions that move corporate assets into or out of the stock market - in particular mergers and acquisitions. In contrast to the actual listing count, the US merger-adjusted count hardly peaks over 1980--2017 and does not...