Focusing on economic distress episodes in an industry, we estimate the effect of conglomeration on resource allocation. Distressed segments have higher sales growth, higher cash flow, and higher expenditure on research and development than single-segment firms. This is especially true for...

Using economic distress in an industry as a natural experiment, we test the alternate theories of conglomeration. We find that segments in distressed industries experience better performance than single-segment firms. The distressed segments have higher sales growth, higher Ramp;D expenditure...

Boone and Mulherin (2007) document the private firm sale process and find that the wealth eff ects for target shareholders are comparable in both auctions and negotiations. Since auctions are more costly relative to negotiations, this begs the question of whether firms should use auctions. We...