Three Essays On Merger Outcomes: Corporate Strategy, Bargaining Power, And Valuation Waves

This dissertation consists of three essays on merger outcomes. In the first essay I classify mergers as value-increasing, neutral, or value-decreasing by measuring the change in the combined wealth of acquiring- and target-firm shareholders at the merger announcement date. I then test the role that strategic objectives and negotiation procedures play in driving value-increasing mergers. The results indicate that geographic expansion creates the largest combined increase in wealth. One-on-one negotiations correspond to greater increases in combined wealth, when compared to mergers that begin with auctions, third-party bids, or mutual discussions. The results of my study support both the strategic-alignment and targeted-synergistic-negotiation hypotheses. The second essay contributes to the literature by identifying novel proxies of bargaining power, such as the negotiation process and underlying deal motivations cited by management. By identifying five mutually exclusive negotiation procedures used to initiate a merger, I am able to simultaneously test theoretical predictions about sales procedure and bidding strategy. I find evidence that a one-on-one negotiation is preferable to an auction in the presence of information costs. Subsequently, I test the bargaining power hypothesis; which states that the strength of the acquiring and target managers’ bargaining positions drives the distribution of wealth. In mergers that start as auctions, the winning bidder captures the majority of wealth creation. I find that operational expertise provides a significant bargaining advantage for targets. However, acquirers capture the majority of wealth when merging with targets experiencing financial distress. The third essay uses the most recent financial crisis and subsequent recovery provide a natural experiment to test hypotheses related to value creation and distribution. I find three key results. First, the likelihood of a value-increasing merger was not correlated with market valuation, such that the proportion of value-increasing mergers did not increase during the Financial Crisis. Second, although there is some evidence that the frequency of unrelated mergers increased during the Financial Crisis, access to capital was the more critical deal motivation. Third, my results indicate that financially distressed targets had higher debt and lost considerable negotiating leverage during the financial crisis

The Great Debate, Britain 1868-1876: An Exploration of British Politics via Reacting to the Past

The Victorian era (ca. 1830 – 1900) in Britain saw massive economic and social transformations brought about by industrialization and the emergence, for the first time, of a modern class society. This research project focused on creating an innovative way for students of history to learn about the various political, economic, and social changes shaping and being shaped by the decisions of the British government in the latter half of the 19th century by using the Reacting to the Past curriculum framework. In particular, it focused on the historical first ministries of William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, their famous feud on the floor of the House of Commons and in the pages of every British newspaper, and their respective influence in shaping the modern world’s conception of liberal and conservative ideologies

Quiet on the Set!: Writing Socially in an Elementary After-School Video Club

The research presented is a qualitative case study of an after-school video club for elementary age students. The focus of the project revolved around one main question: how do students socially read and write videos? The broader goal of the question was to understand how students socially read and write multimodal texts with video as a subset. The study was approached from sociocultural approach to literacy that recognizes videomaking as a new literacies practice. As a literacy practice, videomaking incorporates multiple authors, multiple communicative modes (visual, spatial, aural, gestural, and linguistic), and involves complex and dynamic social interactions between both readers and writers of texts. Using qualitative methods of data collection and analysis, one site (the Midway Elementary After-School Video Club) was studied for a complete school year. There were 23 participants in the study including 20 4th and 5th grade students, two adult volunteers, and a participant/researcher. The findings of the study outline how participants at the site socially read and wrote videos: by inventing, revising, and following a socially established videomaking process (pre-production, production, post-production, and distribution), by behaving in ways that were influenced by sociocultural contexts specific to videomaking at the site (protocols, roles, tools, products), and interacting in specific and identifiable ways (inquiring, instructing, suggesting, and evaluating) to both solve\u27 and \u27find\u27 problems during literacy events. Videomaking required multiple authorship and, depending on how students responded to the sociocultural contexts, the opportunity for democratic writing was made possible and sometimes inevitable. Through the study of social videomaking, the research deomonstates the social nature of all literacies.\u2

Developing Techniques for the Identification of Non-Canonical RNA Pairing and Analysis of LC-MS Datasets

Non-canonical pairing dynamics in ribonucleic acid (RNA) structureand statistical analysis of metabolomics liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS) datasets are two difficult problems that stand as open challenges. RNA folding algorithms are used across a variety of disciplines to predict structures when experimental elucidation techniques are inconvenient or impractical. Though successful and widely adopted, folding algorithms make simplifying assumptions for loop regions due to their complex interactions and associated difficulty with generating energy parameters for relevant non-canonical pairing interactions. Modeling assumptions and a lack of energy parameters for loops limit accuracy in these functional critical regions of RNA. This work describes a new technique for probing non-canonical loop interactions through the combined analysis of dimethyl sulfate (DMS) and three-dimensional crystallographic data. We demonstrate that DMS data encodes information about non-canonical pairing which describes these interactions in an efficient, high throughput manner. Metabolomics aims to understand biological processes through the analysis of small molecule metabolites. The field primarily uses 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy as well as LC-MS to identify and quantitate metabolites. With even simple samples having hundreds or thousands of metabolites, researchers in the field have developed software pipelines to make metabolomics studies a tractable task. Numerous packages exist for the analysis of either 1H NMR or LC-MS data, but current offerings force researchers to use multiple packages to analyze both data types. To address the need for a metabolomics package capable of analyzing both, we have developed new LC-MS functionality for the NMR metabolomics package MVAPACK. Advisor: Joseph D. Yesselma