This paper investigates the merger wave hypothesis for the US and the UK employing a Markov regime switching model. Using quarterly data covering the last thirty years, for the US, we identify the beginning of a merger wave in the mid 1990s but not the much-discussed 1980s merger wave. We argue...

Recent economic reforms in Egypt have significantly improved its macroeconomic indicators and financial sector. Banks have witnessed significant merger and acquisition activity as a result of these reforms in attempts to privatize and strengthen the banking sector. This study measures the...

The multivariate reduced rank regression model plays an important role in econo- metrics. Examples include co-integration analysis and models with a factor struc- ture. Geweke (1996) provided the foundations for a Bayesian analysis of this model. Unfortunately several of the full conditional...

We find that the location of corporate headquarters significantly affects the firm’s bondholders. Similar to Loughran and Schultz (2006) and others, who show that investors are better able to obtain information on nearby companies, we look at firms located in large metropolitan cities, small...

In this paper we examine the theoretical conditions under which a firm will have incentives to optimallychoose investment projects of duration that deviates from its stated horizon objective. Our approachconsiders a context in which investment horizon is subject to randomness and its length is...

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing decisions in whichcorporate insiders have superior information about the firm's growth prospects. We show thatrms with positive private information can credibly signal their type to outside investors usingthe timing of corporate...

This paper tests two competing hypotheses about the influence of financial institutions as large shareholders on the performance of their industrial portfolio firms: the superior monitoring hypothesis versus the rent extraction hypothesis. The methodology of this study exploits the abolishment...