Bidder Discounts and Target Premia in Takeovers

When a takeover is announced, the sum of the stock-market values of the firms involved often falls, and the value of the acquirer almost always does. Does this mean that takeovers do not raise the values of the firms involved? Not necessarily. We set up a model in which the equilibrium number of takeovers is constrained efficient. Yet, upon news of a takeover, a target's price rises, the bidder's price falls, and, most of the time the joint value of the target and acquirer also falls.

Foreign Corporations and the Culture of Transparency: Evidence from Russian Administrative Data

Foreign-owned firms from advanced countries carry the culture of transparency in business transactions that is orthogonal to the culture of hiding and insider dealing in many developing economies and economies in transition. In this paper, we document this using administrative data on reported earnings and market values of cars owned by workers employed in foreign-owned and domestic firms in Moscow, Russia. We examine whether closer ties to foreign corporations result in the diffusion of transparency to private Russian firms. We find that Russian firms initially founded in partnerships with foreign corporations are twice as transparent in reported earnings of their workers as other Russian firms, but they are still less than half as transparent as foreign firms themselves. We also find that increased links to foreign corporations, such as hiring more workers from them, raise the transparency of domestic firms. An important channel for this transmission appears to be the need to keep official wages and salaries of incumbent workers close to wages domestic firms have to pay to their newly hired workers with experience in multinationals.

Bidder Discounts and Target Premia in Takeovers

On news of a takeover, the sum of the stock-market values of the firms involved often falls, and the value of the acquirer almost always does. Does this mean that takeovers do not raise the values of the firms involved? Not necessarily. We set up a model in which the equilibrium number of takeovers is constrained efficient. Yet, upon news of a takeover, a target’s price rises, the bidder’s price falls, and, most of the time the joint value of the target and acquirer also falls

Acquisitions, Productivity, and Profitability: Evidence from the Japanese Cotton Spinning Industry

We explore how changes in ownership and managerial control affect the productivity and profitability of producers. Using detailed operational, financial, management, and ownership data from the Japanese cotton spinning industry at the turn of the last century, we find a more nuanced picture than the straightforward “higher productivity buys lower productivity” story commonly appealed to in the literature. Acquired firms’ production facilities were not on average any less physically productive than the plants of the acquiring firms before acquisition, conditional on operating. They were much less profitable, however, due to consistently higher inventory levels and lower capacity utilization—differences which reflected problems in managing the inherent uncertainties of demand in the industry. When these less profitable plants were purchased by more profitable establishments, the acquired plants saw drops in inventories and gains in capacity utilization that raised both their productivity and profitability levels, consistent with acquiring owner/managers spreading their better demand management abilities across the acquired capital

Knowledge diffusion and industry growth: the case of Japan’s early cotton spinning industry

The diffusion of technological knowledge is key to industry growth. But not all knowledge is created equal. I use a nanoeconomic approach to examine knowledge-diffusion based growth in the Meiji-era Japanese cotton spinning industry, which enjoyed remarkable success after a decade of initial failure. By tracing sources of technological knowledge to individual engineers, I find that successful technology diffusion required the right kind of human capital embodying and transmitting knowledge, and a competitive environment that rewarded talent while weeding out incompetence