An overview of three decades of mergers and acquisitions research

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have long attracted managers’ attention and have been researched in different perspectives and using different theories. In this study we grasp the wealth of extant research in the field of M&As. We conducted a bibliometric study of 635 articles on strategic management and international business research published in 34 highly ranked management journals between 1983 and 2012. We performed citation, co-citation and factor analyses to uncover the issues examined by scholars, the main theoretical approaches and themes researched. The results show a relative shift from economic and financial approaches to knowledge-based and organizational learning perspectives in recent years. There was also an evolution from assessing the performance of firms after an M&A to seeking an understanding of what may drive synergy creation after the integration process. Furthermore we observed an increasing interest in cross-border M&As. We discuss our findings, identifying gaps and suggesting paths for future research.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Can the meson cloud explain the nucleon strangeness?

We use the meson cloud model, including the kaon and the $K^*$ contributions, to estimate the electric and magnetic strange form factors of the nucleon. We compare our results with the recent measurements of the strange quark contribution to parity-violating asymmetries in the forward G0 electron-proton scattering experiment. We conclude that it is not possible to explain the data using this model.Comment: version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Bifurcation Analysis of the Watt Governor System

This paper pursues the study carried out by the authors in {\it Stability and Hopf bifurcation in the Watt governor system} \cite{smb}, focusing on the codimension one Hopf bifurcations in the centrifugal Watt governor differential system, as presented in Pontryagin's book {\it Ordinary Differential Equations}, \cite{pon}. Here are studied the codimension two and three Hopf bifurcations and the pertinent Lyapunov stability coefficients and bifurcation diagrams, illustrating the number, types and positions of bifurcating small amplitude periodic orbits, are determined. As a consequence it is found a region in the space of parameters where an attracting periodic orbit coexists with an attracting equilibrium.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure