Assessing market attractiveness for mergers and acquisitions: the M&A Attractiveness Index Score

This paper presents a new scoring methodology designed to measure a country's capability to attract and sustain business investment activity in the forms of cross-border inflow and domestic mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We compute a theoretically grounded Index of Attractiveness for M&A purposes based on groups of country development factors which have been identified as key drivers of corporate investment activity in economics, finance and management literature. By using the Index, which has been successfully tested against country-level M&A activity in a time series analysis, we show that the drivers of M&A activity differ significantly at different stages of country maturity. Specifically, for mature countries, the quality of their regulatory systems, political stability, socio-economic environment and the sophistication of their physical infrastructure as well as the availability of sizeable assets all determine differences in country-level M&A volume and value activity. For countries at the transitional stage, it is instead their economic and financial health, socio-economic environment, technological developments and the quality of their infrastructure and the availability of sizeable assets which drive M&A activity. We also prove the predictability power of the Index, by a set of Granger causality tests, showing not only how country-level development drives future M&A activity but also how, to some extent, the inverse relationship is also true, i.e. that M&A activity can contribute to country development

Firms' Main Market, Human Capital and Wages

Recent international trade literature emphasizes two features in characterizing the current patterns of trade: efficiency heterogeneity at the firm level and quality differentiation. This paper explores human capital and wage differences across firms in that context. We build a partial equilibrium model predicting that firms selling in more-remote markets employ higher human capital and pay higher wages to employees within each education group. The channel linking these variables is firms’ endogenous choice of quality. Predictions are tested using Spanish employer-employee matched data that classify firms according to four main destination markets: local, national, European Union, and rest of the World. Employees’ average education is increasing in the remoteness of firm’s main output market. Market–destination wage premia are large, increasing in the remoteness of the market, and increasing in individual education. These results suggest that increasing globalization may play a significant role in raising wage inequality within and across education groups

Replication files for GVCs and the Endogenous Geography of RTAs

We compare the observed RTAs to the probability threshold optimizing the joint prediction of signed and unsigned agreements, and derive a counterfactual RTA geography by signing predicted but unsigned agreements. To assess the trade and welfare consequences of signing unsigned agreements in General Equilibrium, we follow Anderson, Larch & Yotov (2018) and use a General Equilibrium Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (GEPPML) method to solve the system of equations associated with the model. We proceed by estimating a probability model using data over the 1990-2014 period; the fiveyear lag for covariates implies that we will consider agreements that were signed between country pairs over the 1995-2014 period, adding to the usual controls for the indirect involvement of the country pair in the fragmentation of value chains. We evaluate model goodness-of-fit by considering the probability cut-off that provides the best percentage of correctly-predicted events (a countrypair being, or not, members at a given date of an RTA: RTA=1 and RTA=0).: the optimal cut-off probability maximizes the percentages of true positives and true negatives. We focus on the mis-classified RTAs that are classified as FP from the probabilistic model are be used in a structural gravity system to evaluate the welfare changes associated with alternative sets of trade agreement

Exchange Rate Strategies in the Competition for Attracting FDI.

Building on the needs for long term capital inflows in developing countries, this paper reconsiders the choice of an exchange-rate regime by integrating the determinants of multinational firms locations. The trade-off between price competitiveness and a stable nominal exchange rate is modeled. It is shown that exchange rate volatility is detrimental to foreign direct investment and that its impact compares with misalignments. The main result is that the building of currency blocks could be a way of increasing FDI to emerging countries as a whole. The frontiers of monetary areas would then be strongly influenced by geography, as FDI is.FOREIGN INVESTMENTS ; EXCHANGE RATE ; MONETARY POLICY

Intra-industry trade and the single market Quality matters

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:3597.9512(1959) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Development of a Broodstock Diet to Improve Developmental Competence of Embryos in European Eel, Anguilla Anguilla

International audienceWe examined the effect of dietary arachidonic acid (ARA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) on the production of embryos and hatched larvae in the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. Two diets with high and intermediate levels of ARA and low and intermediate levels of EPA (Feed 1: ARA 1.9%, EPA 4.2%; Feed 2: ARA 1.2%, EPA 5.1% of total fatty acids) were tested against a commercial diet (DE: ARA: 0.5%, EPA: 8.2% of total fatty acids). After 24 weeks of feeding, ARA levels in the muscles and ovaries increased to 0.9% and 1.3% of total fatty acids, respectively, in Feed 1 and were significantly higher than in Feed 2 and DE. Female broodstock was not fed during hormonal treatment to induce vitellogenesis and ovulation. EPA levels in females fed the test diets decreased in the both muscle and ovary and were significantly lower in eggs from females fed Feed 1. The highest percentage of stripped females, producing viable eggs and larvae, were those females fed the highest dietary ARA levels (Feed 1). The level of lipid peroxidation products in eggs was similar among treatment, indicating that the lowest dietary levels of vitamin C and vitamin E were sufficient. In the unfertilized eggs, ARA levels were also highest (1.1% of total fatty acids) in the diet with highest ARA levels (Feed 1)