Over the past decade, the banking industry has undergone rapid consolidation; indeed, on average, for the past three years there were more than two bank mergers every business day. Before the 1990s, most bank mergers involved banks with less than $1 billion in assets; more recently, even the...

The authors generalize traditional event-study techniques to allow for event-induced parameter shifts, shifting variances, and firm-specific event periods. Their method, which nests traditional methods, also permits systematic risk to change gradually during the event period and exit the period...

This paper explores the effect on costs when firms within an industry must interact with each other in the normal course of business. Such interaction will generally cause the socially optimal scale of each firm to deviate from its minimum average cost scale. In addition, the socially optimal...