One approach that antitrust enforcement authorities use to address potentially anticompetitive mergers is to seek divestitures in specific, competitively problematic overlap markets while allowing the rest of the merger to consummate. We evaluate the efficacy of this approach by studying...

This study investigates the relationships among the influence of the largest shareholder, the entry mode of foreign direct investment companies in Korea, and subsidiary divestitures to demonstrate how the government's FDI policies can work as a moderator. Using data from 468 foreign...

Due to the switching behavior of online consumers, news outlets increasingly compete with each other to attract audience for each single news item they produce, rather than for complete editions of their newspapers: the so called unbundling of journalism. Using a standard Hotelling duopoly model...

Die Eisenbahninfrastruktur des DB Konzerns wird seit der Bahnreform 1994 zusammen mit den Eisenbahnverkehrsunternehmen in einer vertikal integrierten Konzernstruktur organisiert. Diese Konzernstruktur steht jedoch im Verdacht, Wettbewerbsverzerrungen auf der Ebene der...

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to study the impact of divestitures on shareholder wealth. This study covers selloffs of publicly traded companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH region) during the period 2002-2018. It aims to understand the overall effect of selloffs on...

This paper evaluates the importance of property rights institutions', which protect citizens against expropriation by the government and powerful elites, and contracting institutions', which enable private contracts between citizens. We exploit exogenous variation in both types of institutions...

This paper addresses the impact on investment incentives of the network sharing arrangements mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, with a focus on the implications of irreversible investment. Although the goal is to promote competition, the sharing rules now in place reduce incentives...

Divestitures often accompany acquisitions, representing on average 33% of the acquisition value. Relying on a global sample, we provide support for the efficient restructuring view of acquisition-related divestitures. On average, acquisition-related divestitures are associated with an increase...

We shed light on the drivers and consequences of turnover in human resources for the UK football industry. We employ an event study using daily panel data of player transfers for a group of listed UK football clubs. Our results suggest asymmetric wealth effects: the acquisition of players is...

In evaluating mergers between pharmaceutical companies, the FTC frequently requires divestiture of drug products that are in the pipeline — that is, they have yet to be approved by the FDA or brought to market. This study examines the effectiveness of such pipeline mergers to ask whether the...

Understanding the implications of digital platform strategies on user welfare has become a crucial issue for policy makers and economists alike. In payments, distributed ledger technologies such as the blockchain have introduced new models of platform governance in the form of vertically...

This paper shows that returns to education are not enough to capture all the returns to human capital. Using longitudinal data of all college graduates in Colombia, we estimate labor market returns to postsecondary degrees and to various skills— including literacy, numeracy, foreign language,...

Are divestitures only an ex-post reactive correction of past inefficient acquisitions or are they also an ex-ante proactive strategy to enhance the value of future acquisitions? We find support for the latter. Firms engaging in divestitures before making acquisitions obtain higher abnormal...

The revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, known as MiFID II, requires the unbundling of research payments from trading execution. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we examine whether this regulation achieved its intended objective. We find that MiFID II weakened...

Das vorliegende Dissertationsprojekt gibt Einblicke in Unternehmensrestrukturierungen und identifiziert Leistungstreiber von Equity Carve-Out (ECO) und Spin-off. Ziel der Dissertation ist es, zu verifizieren, ob ECO- und Spin-off-Transaktionen Unternehmenswert schaffen und zu evaluieren, ob die...

Using hand-collected data on activist-initiated divestitures, we compare the long- term effects of hedge fund activists on their targets with that of other shareholder activists. We show that the distinguishing features of hedge funds are associated with substantial improvements in target-firm...

Unbundling of vertically integrated utilities has become an integral element in the regulation of network industries and has been implemented in many jurisdictions. The idea of separating the network, as the natural monopoly, from downstream retailing, which may be exposed to competition, is...

We show that divestitures accompanying horizontal mergers affect both the market power potential and the competitive efficiency of merging firms. Stock price reactions of customer firms are more positive (hence divestitures are more effective in mitigating the market power impact of the merger)...

This paper contributes to a sparse literature on merger remedies amid renewed interest in assessing remedy effectiveness by global antitrust policy agencies. Despite frequent use in practice, merger remedies receive little attention in the economics literature. We address this deficiency by...

We try to better understand the comparative advantages of structural and behavioral remedies of deregulation in electricity markets, an eminent policy issue for which the experimental evidence is scant and problematic. Specifically, we investigate theoretically and experimentally the effects on...

Prior research showed that corporate divestitures could help firms restore their strategic (versus financial) controls and long-term focus. This suggests that divestiture activities may have implications for firms’ commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) following divestitures....

This paper analyses the determinants of aggregate per-capita investments into the telecom sector. We provide results of panel econometric estimates for EU and OECD countries covering the period from 2005 to 2013. The findings show a positive effect of infrastructure-based competition between...

The article “Embeddedness across Governance Modes” by Schilke and Jiang (2019) studies whether and how governance modes are intertwined over time. As such, this article belongs to the literature in corporate strategy that aims at developing our understanding of firms' sequential use of...

This paper examines the role of firm-level experience in the context of divestitures. We find that divesting firms that have recent divestiture experience (hereafter, experienced divestors) are more likely to sell peripheral or underperforming units, and to divest during industry merger waves....

The existence of many markets that a firm simultaneously accesses creates information transfers, wherein the price formed in one market reveals information to another. Specifically, when the firm divests an asset, facilitating the information transfer from the firm's stock market to the...

This paper explores the stock market performance of acquisitions and divestitures where both, one, or neither of the companies in the transaction are family firms. We find that acquirer shareholder returns are highest when family firms buy businesses from non-family firm divesters, especially...

We examine how divestitures influence improvements in a firm's resource base, as indicated by new product development. Because improvements in firms' resource bases depend upon available managerial capacity, divestitures that release greater managerial capacity should drive greater improvements...

We examine the effect of MiFID II, which mandated the unbundling and separate pricing of analyst research in Europe beginning in 2018. We find that the requirements of MiFID II were associated with a reduction in analyst following for European firms relative to US firms, with decreases in...

Germany is in the midst of a radical transformation of its power sector, which in 2016 led two of its main electric utilities, EON and RWE, to undertake dramatic restructurings. EON spun off its fossil fuel and trading segments, while RWE carved out its renewable energy, retail and grid...