This paper reviews the vast academic literature on the market for corporate control. Our main
focus is the cyclical wave pattern that this market exhibits. We address the following …

This chapter surveys the recent empirical literature and adds to the evidence on takeover
bids for US targets, 1980–2005. The availability of machine readable transaction databases …

Intangible assets are a large and growing part of firms' capital stocks. Intangibles are
accumulated via investment—foregoing consumption today for output in the future—but they …

We create a culture dictionary using one of the latest machine learning techniques—the
word embedding model—and 209,480 earnings call transcripts. We score the five corporate …

Since the late 1990s, over 75% of US industries have experienced an increase in
concentration levels. We find that firms in industries with the largest increases in product …

Using a large and unique patent‐merger data set over the period 1984 to 2006, we show
that companies with large patent portfolios and low R&D expenses are acquirers, while …

We use text-based analysis of 10-K product descriptions to examine whether firms exploit
product market synergies through asset complementarities in mergers and acquisitions …

We present a model of mergers and acquisitions based on stock market misvaluations of the
combining firms. The key ingredients of the model are the relative valuations of the merging …

Aggregate merger waves could be due to market timing or to clustering of industry shocks for
which mergers facilitate change to the new environment. This study finds that economic …

To test recent theories suggesting that valuation errors affect merger activity, we develop a
decomposition that breaks the market-to-book ratio (M/B) into three components: the firm …