We examine the role of acquirers’ familiarity with targets’ significant downside risks in M&A. We introduce a measure of a firm’s familiarity with another firm’s business downsides using similarity of their risk factor descriptions. We first show that this measure is distinct from...

Due to bond prices pull-to-par, zero-coupon bond historical returns are not stationary, as they tend to zero as time to maturity approaches. Given that the historical simulation method for computing value at risk (VaR) requires a stationary sequence of historical returns, zero-coupon bonds'...