This book examines the issue of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the context of technological development, and in particular the impact of M&As on the innovation process. In so doing, the book integrates two bodies of literature, on M&As, and on innovation studies, a nexus which the editors...

Why are contracts not fully indexed? In a setting in which fully indexed contracts are feasible, the authors find that, when price-level data are gathered with delay, these contracts are not renegotiation-proof. The contracts that replace them entail a lower level of welfare for the parties to...

Why do some start-up firms raise funds from banks and others from venture capitalists? To answer this question, I develop a model of start-up financing when intellectual property rights are not well protected. The upside of VC financing is that the VC understands the business better than a bank....

We propose a new theory of systemic risk based on Knightian uncertainty (or "ambiguity"). We show that, due to uncertainty aversion, beliefs on future asset returns are endogenous, and bad news on one asset class induces investors to be more pessimistic about other asset classes as well. This...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, and after decades of relative neglect, the importance of the financial system and its episodic crises as drivers of macroeconomic outcomes has attracted fresh scrutiny from academics, policy makers, and practitioners. Theoretical advances are following a...

We analyze political selection in a closed list proportional system where parties have strong gate-keeping power, which they use as an instrument to pursue votes. Parties face a trade-off between selecting loyal candidates or experts, who are highly valued by the voters and thus increase the...

This paper synthesizes and extends the literature on the taxation of foreign source income in a framework that covers both greenfield and acquisition investment, and a general constraint linking investment at home and abroad for the multinational by introducing a cost of adjustment for the...

The success or failure of the fight against tax havens is the outcome of a coordination game between a tax haven and its potential investors. Key determinants are the costly international pressure and the haven country's revenue pool. The latter is determined endogenously by the decisions of...

In earlier work (Bénabou, Ticchi and Vindigni 2013) we uncovered a robust negative association between religiosity and patents per capita, holding across countries as well as US states, with and without controls. In this paper we turn to the individual level, examining the relationship between...