Mergers and acquisitions are often motivated by the intention of creating value from intangible assets. We develop a novel word list of intangibles and apply it to takeover announcements. Deals presented with more “intangibles talk” complete more quickly. However, the value of these deals to...

We quantify the impact of merger activity on productive efficiency. We develop and calibrate a dynamic industry-equilibrium model that features mergers, entry, and exit by heterogeneous firms. Mergers affect productivity directly through realized synergies, and indirectly through firms'...

We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger profitability of targets, a decrease in the size of acquirers...

The distribution of firm sizes is known to be heavy tailed. In order to account for this stylized fact, previous studies have focused mainly on growth through investments in a company's own operations (internal growth). Thereby, the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on the firm size...

I study a protectionist anti-takeover law introduced in 2014 that covers a subset of all firms in the economy. The law decreased affected firms' likelihood of becoming the target of a merger or acquisition and had a negative impact on shareholder value. There is no evidence that management of...

This paper considers changes in market comovement of merging US firms. Comparing the expected to the actual post merger comovement, we find that the post merger beta exhibits excess comovement with the acquiring firm. This suggests that the firm's comovement is at least partly determined by its...

This paper uses mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and textual analysis of firms' financial filings to show that competitive strategy constitutes an important determinant of firms' investment decisions. The analysis reveals that becoming an acquirer or a target depends on the strategy. Moreover, M&A...

The information on the impact of mobility on society is plenty but scattered. A good understanding of the impact of mobility requires first an understanding of what mobility actually means. This paper lists aspects of mobility that can contribute to a useful conceptualisation. It is found that...

We examine gender differences in careers using a large linked employer-employee dataset on Finnish white-collar manufacturing workers over the period of 1981-2006. Our focus is on labour market entrants whom we follow over time. We find that men start their careers from higher ranks of the...

This paper aims to provide an overview of the recently introduced demand based innovation policy instrument in Finland - the Strategic Centers for Science, Technology and Innovation (in Finnish - SHOKs). SHOKs are formed to support the innovative activities of existing industries in Finland with...