Board connections and M&A transactions

We examine M&A transactions between firms with current board connections and find that acquirers obtain higher announcement returns in transactions with a first-degree connection where the acquirer and the target share a common director. Acquirer returns are also higher in transactions with a second-degree connection where one acquirer director and one target director serve on the same third board. Our results suggest that first-degree connections benefit acquirers with lower takeover premiums while second-degree connections benefit acquirers with greater value creation. Overall, we provide new evidence that board connectedness plays important roles in corporate investments and leads to greater value creation

Portfolio Flows, Foreign Direct Investment, Crises

The goal of the paper is to analyze how financial and economic crises affect the relation between capital flows and their determinants. We develop a model of foreign portfolio investment (FPI) and foreign direct investment (FDI), and apply it to Turkey using an endogenous break analysis and accounting for country risk. We identify two breakpoints that correspond to two crises dates. Our results show changes in the sign and/or coefficient of a number of determinants in both types of investment and thus suggest that analyses based on the assumption of parameter constancy may lead to misleading results.capital flows, crises, structural changes

A Nonlinear Approach to Public Finance Sustainability in Latin America

The debt crisis in Latin America is associated with the large fiscal imbalances of the 1980s; therefore public finance sustainability occupies the center of stabilization efforts in these economies. The literature examining this question in emerging economies is surprisingly scant and this paper aims at filling this gap. We analyze sustainability for a sample of Latin American countries, employing unit root tests that incorporate nonlinear alternative hypotheses. These tests capture the thresholds or corridor regimes that international agreements or markets impose on emerging economies' public finances. We show that support for sustainability substantially improves when such nonlinearities are taken into account.