The new CERIS panel on Italian firms covers the period from 1977 to 1997. The panel is unbalanced and includes 1710 manufacturing firms with at least five consecutive years. It contains condensed balance sheet and profit and loss data (collected from Mediobanca annual directory "Le Principali...

Using the Italian and European Union competition authorities databases over the 1991-1994 period, this paper analyses the ownership reallocation process in Italy, in terms of the characteristics of acquired firms and the effects of ownership changes. Our results show that acquired firms’...

Unlike traditional studies on the efficiency-enhancing effect of ownership changes – which use either profitability measures or stock prices – this paper measures the effect of acquisitions directly on acquired firms’ technical efficiency. Using a panel of Italian firms in the pasta...

The aim of this paper is to review the "state of the art" of empirical analysis on the subject of the effects of mergers and acquisitions. After a brief introduction I will present the conflicting evidence outlined, up to the mid eighties, by the Industrial Organization stream of analysis and...