One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves that are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We use a natural way to discriminate between pure stock market influences on firm decisions and other influences by examining merger patterns...

This paper studies the dynamics of emerging excess returns in a industry-by-industry context. Differently from the recent financial literature, which mainly focuses on 'total market indexes', we perform a standard ex-post empirical analysis aimed at capturing the industries' contribution to...