We study how common ownership among potential acquirers influences the firm selling process. We find that, when potential acquirers share a common owner, the target firm is more likely to be sold through auction rather than negotiation with a single acquirer. The presence of common owner does...

In two natural experiments based on H-1B visa lotteries and a drastic cut in the annual H-1B visa quota, we document that firms respond to shortages in high-skilled workers by acquiring target firms that have these workers. Additional tests show that desire for the target's skilled labor is an...

We use accounting theory to develop a new measure of the quality of mergers and acquisitions, implied return-on-equity improvement (IRI), which quantifies the minimum improvement in the target’s accounting returns after acquisition needed to justify the offer price. We validate our measure by...

Alpha depends on return measurement horizon, both theoretically and empirically. We demonstrate how alphas depend on horizon, introduce a procedure to estimate long-return-horizon alphas from short-horizon returns, and find that among those mutual funds with positive alphas estimated from...