Why do regulatory authorities scrutinize mergers and acquisitions? The authorities themselves claim to be combating monopoly power and protecting consumers. But the last two decades of empirical research has found little supporting evidence for such motives. An alternative is that Mamp;A...

Acquisitions, mergers and other business agreements are facing increasing regulatory scrutiny, even when they are among firms domiciled outside the territory of the regulatory authorities. Some noteworthy recent examples involve mergers between American firms that were prohibited by regulators...

Knowledge gleaned from previous acquisitions may confer valuation expertise and other benefits. But numerous acquisitions also entail costs, due to problems of incorporating diverse units into an ever larger firm. Such benefits and costs are not directly observable from outside the firm. This...

Many takeovers occur after one-on-one negotiations, which suggests a troubling lack of competition. We seek to determine whether acquirers in such friendly deals are truly insulated from competitive pressures. We study two countervailing influences: (1) potential but unobserved latent...

Economic (Bhagwat, Dam and Harford, 2016), political (Cao, Li and Liu, 2019), and policy (Nam and Hieu, 2017; Bonaime, Gulen and Ion, 2018) uncertainty affect merger and acquisition (M&A) activity. In this paper, we use Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) interventions in...

Overbidding implies a failure to adequately account for the winner's curse. Surprisingly few papers have attempted to develop a direct empirical test of the presence of overbidding in M&A contests. We develop such a test grounded on a necessary condition for profit maximizing bidding behavior;...

The analysis of US M&A transactions through the last decades reveals a striking and sharp declining in the percentage of transactions fully paid in stock since 2001, the year of pooling and goodwill amortization abolishment (SFAS 141 and 142). Can accounting rule changes have had such far...

Large merger and acquisition (M&A) samples feature the pervasive presence of repetitive acquirers. They offer an attractive empirical context for revealing the presence of acquirer skills (persistent superior performance). But panel data M&A are quite heterogeneous: just a few acquirers...

Firms may rationally select CEOs whose level of narcissism is compatible with their circumstances. We model the firm-CEO matching process in which narcissistic CEOs are matched to firms characterized by their shareholders' risk aversion. This leads us to predict that (i) contemporaneous (future)...