have witnessed significant merger and acquisition activity as a result of these reforms in attempts to privatize and …

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 that the latter finding can be ascribed to the refined methods of …

We analyze a Bayesian merger game under two-sided asymmetric information about firm types. We show that the standard … prediction of the lemons market model-if any, only low-type firms are traded-is likely to be misleading: Merger returns, i.e. the … difference between pre- and post-merger profits, are not necessarily higher for low-type firms. This has two implications. First …

We consider a setting in which two potential merger partners each possess private information pertaining both to the … ex-post regret an unavoidable phenomenon in merger negotiations. To this end, we consider ex-post incentive compatible … mechanisms, which use both players' reports to determine whether or not a merger will take place and what each player will earn …

' types. We show that there is always a no-merger equilibrium where firms do not consent to a merger, irrespective of their … type. There may also be a cut-off equilibrium if the expected merger returns satisfy a suitable single crossing condition …, which will hold if a firm's merger returns are essentially monotone decreasing in its type. Applying our analysis to the …