This study investigates the determinants of changes in corporate ownership and firm failure, taking into account different types of sellers and buyers of control blocks. For a large panel of German corporations we find that firms are more likely to fail or to be sold when performance is poor,...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the effects of cross-border M&As on investing firms' domestic performance in the U.K. and France. We build a new firm-level dataset that combines a global M&A database with balance sheet data for the years 2000-2007. Combining matching techniques with a...

This paper extends the literature on the determinants of international activity at the fi rm level towards cross-border acquisitions and greenfield investments as different modes of FDI using a rich dataset of British firms. While multinational firms are characterized by higher productivity...

Cash-rich bidders in UK have better announcement abnormal returns than cash-poor ones during 1984-2007, contrasting previous findings in the US. The positive cash reserve effect is mainly from bidders of high long-run growth or those with non-trivial institutional holdings. Moreover, cash-rich...

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...

In August 2007 the United Kingdom experienced its first bank run in over 140 years. Although Northern Rock was not a particularly large bank (it was at the time ranked 7th in terms of assets) it was nevertheless a significant retail bank and a substantial mortgage lender. In fact, ten years...