How and to what extent do managerial control benefits shape the efficiency of the takeover market? We revisit this question by estimating both the dark and bright sides of managerial control benefits in an industry equilibrium model. On the dark side, managers' private benefits of control...

Because firms' takeover motives are unobservable to investors, mergers are only partially anticipated and often appear as mixed blessings for acquirers. I construct and estimate a model to study the causes and consequences of bid anticipation and information revelation in mergers. Controlling...

An active M&A market incentivizes many firms to specialize in innovation with the anticipation of being acquired in the future. Acquiring innovation, however, is subject to information frictions, because acquirers often find it challenging to assess the value and impact of innovative targets....

If opportunistic acquirers can buy targets using overvalued shares, then there is an inefficiency in the merger and acquisition (M&A) market: The most overvalued rather than the highest-synergy bidder may buy the target. We quantify this inefficiency using a structural estimation approach. We...

Do informed shareholders who can influence corporate decisions improve governance? We demonstrate this may not be generally true in a model of takeovers. The model suggests that a shareholder's ability to collect information and trade ex post may cause him, ex ante, to support value-destroying...