Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

This paper studies how the surplus generated by the globalization process is divided between MNEs and owners of domestic assets. We construct an oligopoly model where the equilibrium acquisition pattern, the acquisition price and firms' greenfield investments are endogenously determined....

This Paper studies cross-border acquisitions and greenfield entry in a multi-firm setting. Acquisition entry is more likely when the acquirer gains a strong position in the product market, relative to greenfield entrants. We also show that such acquisitions might have a low profitability,...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is the dominant form of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), but has received but scarce attention in the theory literature on trade and investment. This paper highlights how the international pattern of ownership of productive assets may depend on features of trade...

Investment liberalizing countries are often concerned that cross-border mergers & acquisitions might have an adverse effect on domestic firms and benefit multinational enterprises (MNEs). However, given that domestic assets are sufficiently scarce, we identify a preemption effect and an asset...

This paper determines the equilibrium market structure in a mixed international oligopoly, where the state assets are sold at an auction. The model suggests that low greenfield costs and low trade costs induce foreign acquisitions. The intuition is that domestic firms can then not prevent...

This paper determines the equilibrium market structure in an international oligopoly which is opened up by a privatization. Market power is shown to be an important determinant of the equilibrium market structure, when greenfield investment costs are high. When the greenfield investment costs...

We investigate the interaction between cross-border acquisitions and greenfield entry in a multi-firm setting. It is shown that the net profits of the acquirer may decrease when the acquisition gives the acquirer a strong position in the product market, relative to greenfield entrants. The...

An increasingly large share of cross-border acquisitions are undertaken by private equity-firms (PE-firms) and not by traditional multinational enterprises (MNEs). We propose a model of cross-border acquisitions in which MNEs and PE-firms compete over domestic assets. MNEs' advantage lies in...