This paper distinguishes between value creation through redistribution of physical assets and that from intangible assets. We decompose the market-to-book ratio into fundamental value and unexplained components and find that mergers create wealth when high-value firms primarily acquire physical...

This paper investigates the value relevance of acquired intangible assets using a comprehensive hand-collected dataset for 1,647 publicly listed US-firms from 2002 to 2018. This dataset allows us to disentangle acquired intangible assets into different classes (e.g., tech-, customer-, contract-,...

We argue that under the U.S. tax system, where individual investors are taxed separately from the corporations they own, cash-for-stock acquisition (CSA) is inter alia a profitable arbitrage. This argument is based on the idea that the burden of personal taxation creates a wedge between the...

The concept that accounting represents the economics of the firm is a premise for the allocation of scarce resources. In recent years, firm intangible assets seem to have become an increasingly important driver of firm economic value, and yet they are difficult to measure. This study conducts an...