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...

During 1992–2007, suppliers financed almost 10% of the total assets of U.S. listed firms. This intensive usage of trade credit is puzzling in the light of its high (implicit) costs. By arguing that trade credit use provides valuable information to outside investors, we first derive a...

On December 21, 1989 the European Community Counsel promulgated EEC regulation no. 4064/89 and in doing so, reinforced merger operations monitoring and control at the European level. The object of this study is to evaluate the consequences of the application of this regulation to non-European...

The idiosyncratic risk is a key input of the standard event study method. The recent literature has suggested that the idiosyncratic risk is not stable through time, and it has increased significantly in the nineties. This paper investigates to what extent the event study method is affected by...

Recent empirical papers report a declining trend in the cumulative abnormal return (CAR) of acquirers during an Mamp;A program. Does this necessarily imply that acquiring CEOs are infected by hubris and are not learning from previous mistakes? We first confirm the existence of this declining...

The idiosyncratic risk is a key input of the standard event study method. The recent literature has suggested that the idiosyncratic risk is not stable through time, and it has increased significantly in the nineties. This paper investigates to what extent the event study method is affected by...

This paper provides an analysis of legal insider trading on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange by using data published in the register held by the AFM, the dutch financial markets authority. The sample includes 822 transactions executed by corporate insiders between the beginning of January...

Recent empirical research has shown that, from deal to deal, serial acquirers' cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) are declining. This has been most often attributed to CEOs hubris. We question this interpretation. Our theoretical analysis shows that (i) a declining CAR from deal to deal is not...