This study investigates the determinants of changes in corporate ownership and firm failure, taking into account different types of sellers and buyers of control blocks. For a large panel of German corporations we find that firms are more likely to fail or to be sold when performance is poor,...

Technological change is often hypothesized as one of the main drivers of merger activities. This paper analyzes the role of technology in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) at the firm level. Based on a newly created data set that combines financial information and patent data for public firms in...

This paper investigates the motive of pre-empting technology competition through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Exploiting the patent application procedure at the European Patent Office we introduce a new measure for the possibility to create entry barriers in technology markets. Our results...

Over the last few years, worldwide mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have increased sharply both in terms of value and volume. This development has not only been driven by corporate acquirers but also to an increasing extent by private equity investors. In this paper, we analyze differences in...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) constitute a disruption to the working environment of the inventive labor force of the acquired company. If inventors would respond with a decline of their patent productivity or departure from the firm this can be detrimental to the innovative process within the...

Firm acquisitions have been shown to serve as a way to gain access to international markets, technological assets, products or other valuable resources of the target firm. Given this heterogeneity of takeover motivations and the skewness of the distribution of the deal value we show whether and...

Gaining access to technological assets and patents, in particular, has long been a major motive and objective for firm acquisitions. On the one hand, patents are used as a building instrument for the acquirer's technology portfolio. On the other hand, patents can be attractive because of their...

The paper describes the legal and economic environment of mergers and acquisitions in Germany and explores barriers to obtaining and executing corporate control. Various cases are used to demonstrate that resistance by different stakeholders including minority shareholders, organized labour and...

We analyze the degree of contract completeness with respect to staging of venture capital investments using a hand-collected German data set of contract data from 464 rounds into 290 entrepreneurial firms. We distinguish three forms of staging (pure milestone financing, pure round financing and...

The main objective of the present paper is to disentangle observed differences in the design of contracts across VC types into firm selection effects and corporate governance differences between VC types (different contracts). Based on a theoretical approach developed in the first part of the...