International M&A: Evidence on Effects of Foreign Takeovers

In this empirical paper I address the effects of international mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on the acquired firms. International direct investments in the home country are usually welcomed and considered to be beneficial for growth, employment, productivity and technological progress. This is mostly unquestioned for greenfield investments, i.e. the case when a foreign multinational firm sets up a new affiliate. But a majority of foreign direct investment (FDI) projects takes the form of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). This kind of inward FDI is much more critically debated. The focal point of this paper is the development of domestic German firms that are subject to a foreign takeover regarding employment and productivity. For this purpose, I use a comprehensive German micro-level dataset which includes all industries as well as firms from all size categories and all German regions. The sample covers the years from 2000 to 2007. A propensity score matching approach combined with a difference-indifference estimator is applied. Contrary to a naive comparison between foreign-owned firms and domestic firms or a comparison between firm characteristics before and after a foreign takeover, this econometric approach ensures that the causal effects are isolated. The main results are the following: Foreign owned firms are larger and more productive than domestic ones. Mostly firms with below average productivity (lemons) as well as rms with a relatively high productivity (cherries) are acquired. Market development motives seem to play an important role for foreign acquisitions. Concerning the effects of foreign takeovers, a descriptive analysis cannot find unambiguous effects of foreign takeovers. The propensity score matching estimator confirms this finding and detects neither positive nor negative significant effects of foreign takeovers.M&A, inward FDI, foreign takeover, employment, productivtity

Affective continuities across Muslim and Christian settings in Berlin

This article, a reflection on collaborative fieldwork involving a Sufi Muslim and a Pentecostal Christian setting in Berlin, examines whether distinct and diverse religious groups can be brought into a meaningful relation with one another. It considers the methodological possibilities that might become possible or foreclose when two researchers, working in different prayer settings in the same city, use affect as a common frame of reference while seeking to establish shared affective relations and terrains that would otherwise be implausible. With two separately observed accounts of prayer gatherings in a shared urban context, we describe locally specific workings of affect and sensation. We argue that sense-aesthetic forms and patterns in our field sites are supralocal affective forms that help constitute an analytic relationality between the two religious settings

Configuration Space Integrals and Universal Vassiliev Invariants over Closed Surfaces

We show the existence of a universal Vassiliev invariant for links in closed surface cylinders by explicit construction using configuration space integrals.Comment: 22 pages, Latex2

Modeling microwave/electron-cloud interaction

Starting from the separate codes BI-RME and ECLOUD or PyECLOUD, we are developing a novel joint simulation tool, which models the combined effect of a charged particle beam and of microwaves on an electron cloud. Possible applications include the degradation of microwave transmission in tele-communication satellites by electron clouds; the microwave-transmission tecchniques being used in particle accelerators for the purpose of electroncloud diagnostics; the microwave emission by the electron cloud itself in the presence of a magnetic field; and the possible suppression of electron-cloud formation in an accelerator by injecting microwaves of suitable amplitude and frequency. A few early simulation results are presented.Comment: 3 pages, contribution to the Joint INFN-CERN-EuCARD-AccNet Workshop on Electron-Cloud Effects: ECLOUD'12; 5-9 Jun 2012, La Biodola, Isola d'Elba, Ital