Technology spillovers,asset redeployability and corporate financial policies

Prior research shows that technology spillovers across firms increase innovation, productivity and value. We study how firms finance their own growth stimulated by technology spillovers from their technological peer firms. We find that greater technology spillovers lead to higher leverage. This is the result of technology spillovers increasing asset redeployability, as evidenced by more collateralized borrowing and asset transactions. Borrowing costs also decrease. Exogenous variation in the research and development tax credits of other firms allows us to identify the causal effect of technology spillovers on a given firm.     

Direct and indirect knowledge spillovers: the “social network” of open‐source projects

Knowledge spillovers are a central part of knowledge accumulation. The article focuses on spillovers that occur through the interaction between different researchers or developers who collaborate on different research projects. The article distinguishes between project spillovers and contributors’ spillovers and between direct and indirect spillovers. The article constructs a unique data set of open source software projects. The data identify the contributors who work on each project and thus enable us to construct a two‐mode network: a project network and a contributor network. The article demonstrates that the structure of these networks is associated with project success and that there is a positive association between project closeness centrality and project success. This suggests the existence of both direct and indirect project knowledge spillovers. We find no evidence for any association between contributor closeness centrality and project success, suggesting that contributor spillovers play a lesser role in project success.     

Reputational concerns in the market for corporate control

This paper explores whether corporate acquirers consider environmental reputations when planning and structuring takeovers. We find that firms with an environmentally toxic reputation, which have the greatest potential for negative spillovers to their merger partners, have a lower associated probability of being both acquirers and targets. Acquirers are more likely to pair with similar reputation firms and are less likely to acquire firms with lower reputations. Most notably, green firms in our sample never acquire toxic firms. Acquirers that buy firms with differing environmental reputations use a higher percentage of stock in their acquisition offers. We further show that the returns to acquirers are lower when they acquire firms outside of their area. Collectively, these findings suggest that managers account for potential negative spillover effects in acquisition decisions.     

Have R&D Spillovers Declined in the 21st Century?

Slow growth over the last decade has prompted policy attention towards increasing R&D spending, often via the tax system. We examine the impact of R&D on firm performance, both by the firm's own investments and through positive (and negative) spillovers from other firms. We analyse panel data on US firms over the last three decades, and allow for time‐varying spillovers in both technology space (knowledge spillover) and product market space (product market rivalry). We show that the magnitude of R&D spillovers remains as large in the second decade of the 21^st century as it was in the mid 1980s. Since the ratio of the social return to the private return to R&D is about four to one, this implies that there remains a strong case for public support of R&D. Positive spillovers appeared to temporarily increase in the 1995–2004 digital technology boom. We also show how these micro estimates relate to estimates from the endogenous growth literature and give some suggestions for future work.     

Google attention and target price run ups

We explore the increase in the share prices of target firms before their merger announcements. We use a novelty Google search volume to proxy the market expectation hypothesis according to which firms with an abnormal upward change in Google searches are identified as firms with potential merger activity. We find that Google indicators can explain a larger percentage of the price increase in target firms before their mergers than the Financial Times. However even the Google proxy of the market expectation hypothesis can only explain at best 36% of the target price run ups.     

Prominence and consumer search

This article examines the implications of “prominence” in search markets. We model prominence by supposing that the prominent firm will be sampled first by all consumers. If there are no systematic quality differences among firms, we find that the prominent firm will charge a lower price than its less prominent rivals. Making a firm prominent will typically lead to higher industry profit but lower consumer surplus and welfare. The model is extended by introducing heterogeneous product qualities, in which case the firm with the highest‐quality product has the greatest incentive to become prominent, and making it prominent will boost industry profit, consumer surplus, and welfare.     

Search costs,demand‐side economies,and the incentives to merge under Bertrand competition

We study the incentives to merge and the aggregate implications of mergers in a Bertrand competition model where firms sell differentiated products and consumers search sequentially for satisfactory deals. When search frictions are substantial, firms have an incentive to merge and to retail their products within a single store, which induces consumers to begin their search there. Such a merger lowers the profits of the outsiders and may benefit consumers due to more efficient search. Overall welfare may even increase. If the merged entity limits itself to coordinating the prices of the constituent firms, merging may not be profitable.     

Absorptive capacity,technology spillovers,and the cross-section of stock returns

In the presence of potential technology spillovers, I demonstrate that a firm's absorptive capacity (AC), as proxied by R&D investments, is crucial to benefit from spillovers. I find that higher AC firms, when exposed to large potential spillovers, exhibit stronger future real outcomes (cite-weighted patents and operating performance) and market value. Importantly, however, this value-relevant information does not appear to be immediately incorporated into stock prices, leading to high future abnormal stock returns for firms with high AC and spillover exposure. Furthermore, the undervaluation is most pronounced among low investor attention stocks, suggesting that limited attention contributes to the undervaluation.     

Performance, Growth and Earnings Management

We study the relationship between the amount of managed earnings and firms’ earnings performance and expected growth in a reporting model, where managers manipulate earnings to influence the valuation of firms’ equity while bearing a cost that is increasing and convex in the amount of managed earnings. In the unique revealing equilibrium to the model, firms with higher performance and growth over-report earnings by a larger amount because price responsiveness increases with earnings performance and growth. And earnings quality, defined as the proportion of true economic earnings in total reported earnings, increases with earnings performance but decreases with earnings growth. We conduct empirical tests on a large sample and a restatement sample using different proxies for earnings management. Results from the large sample tests support our predictions while results from the restatement sample tests are mixed. Our study provides an alternative explanation to the positive relationship between discretionary accruals estimated from the Jones model and firms’ performance and growth.     

THE EFFECTS OF MUTUAL FUNDS ON M&A COMPENSATION

Motivated by shareholders’ interest in combating executive wealth expropriation through the merger and acqusition (M&A) process, we study how mutual funds influence firm behavior around an acquisition through votes against management proposals. We find that mutual funds reduce the chief executive officer's ability to extract rents during the M&A process by voting against management‐sponsored compensation proposals after the acquisition, thus lowering both excess compensation and increasing pay‐for‐performance sensitivity. Furthermore, mutual fund voting magnifies the impact on negatively performing firms and firms with a larger amount of the mutual fund's holdings in the firm.     

Leverage changes and growth options in mergers and acquisitions

We develop and empirically test a trade-off model for the analysis of leverage changes in mergers and acquisitions. Our study extends prior findings of a post-merger increase in leverage for the acquiring firm, by linking this leverage increase to merging firms that are less correlated, create significantly larger growth options, and have lower bankruptcy costs and lower volatility. Specifically, we show that acquiring firms are more likely to finance diversifying acquisitions with debt as equity holders exploit the increased debt capacity with higher leverage resulting in total merger gains that are positively associated with financial synergies. We also provide evidence of a U-shaped relationship between growth options and leverage changes theoretically and empirically in the context of mergers.     

The Market for Mergers and the Boundaries of the Firm

We relate the property rights theory of the firm to empirical regularities in the market for mergers and acquisitions. We first show that high market-to-book acquirers typically do not purchase low market-to-book targets. Instead, mergers pair together firms with similar ratios. We then build a continuous-time model of investment and merger activity combining search, scarcity, and asset complementarity to explain this like buys like result. We test the model by relating like-buys-like to search frictions. Search frictions and assortative matching vary inversely, supporting the model over standard explanations.     

Trade, Foreign Direct Investment, and International Technology Transfer: A Survey

What role does trade play in international technology transfer?Do technologies introduced by multinational firms diffuse tolocal firms? What kinds of policies have proved successful inencouraging technology absorption from abroad and why? Usingthese questions as motivation, this article surveys the recenttrade literature on international technology transfer, payingparticular attention to the role of foreign direct investment.The literature argues that trade necessarily encourages growthonly if knowledge spillovers are international in scope. Empiricalevidence on the scope of knowledge spillovers (national versusinternational) is ambiguous. Several recent empirical plant-levelstudies have questioned earlier studies that argued that foreigndirect investment has a positive impact on the productivityof local firms. Yet at the aggregate level, evidence supportsthe view that foreign direct investment has a positive effecton economic growth in the host country.      

Measuring Takeover Premiums in Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions: Insights from Turkey

We investigate whether the merger announcement dates provided in a popular mergers and acquisitions (M&A) database, SDC, serve as accurate event dates for estimating the wealth effects of mergers on target firms located in Turkey. We find that 74 percent of SDC’s merger announcement dates are preceded by merger-related events such as merger rumors, target firms’ search for potential acquirers, and early-stage merger negotiation announcements. Target cumulative abnormal return (CAR) estimates around these early dates are almost twice as large as the CAR estimates around SDC’s merger announcement dates. We argue that our findings have implications for the recently flourishing cross-border M&A literature.     

In name only: Information spillovers among Chinese firms with similar stock names during earnings announcements

We examine whether investors' attention on salient firm characteristics affects information spillovers during corporate earnings announcements. For market participants in China, the stock name is a salient feature of listed companies. We find that the market reaction of non-announcing firms to earnings reports of announcing firms is greater across firms with similar stock names. The incremental information spillovers among similarly named stocks are stronger for larger announcing firms and on days with fewer earnings announcements. The incremental information spillovers between similarly named stocks do not fully reverse in the post-announcement period, consistent with persistent investor behavior predicted by the salience theory. There are also significant return comovements among similarly named stocks. Our findings suggest that investors with limited attention are likely to focus on salient stock names and overestimate the economic connections between similarly name stocks. Our study extends the behavioral finance literature by showing how investors' attention on salient firm features can bias their reaction to unrelated peer disclosures.     

Institutional investor distraction and innovation

Prior studies suggest high institutional ownership provides stable funding for firm managers supporting long-term innovation. However, we hypothesize that the level of holdings can also proxy for institutional attention. We address this question and find that institutional distraction negatively impacts board monitoring and advisory support for management, reducing R&D, patent filings, citations and creativity. Distraction is concentrated in (1) firms owned by institutions providing low attention before the shock and (2) industries facing low substitute monitoring through competition. Distraction also affects information flow in firms facing high labour mobility and high peer firm innovation (technology spillovers).     

Do technology spillovers affect the corporate information environment?

Technology spillovers across firms affect corporate innovation, productivity, and value, according to prior research, so information about technology spillovers should matter to investors. We argue that technology spillovers increase the complexity and uncertainty of value relevant information about the firm, which makes information processing more costly, discourages it, and thereby increases information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders. We find that not only does information asymmetry increase, but so does avoidance by sophisticated market participants, uncertainty, and insider trading. We also find that investors do not misestimate short-term earnings, but they underestimate long-term earnings, consistent with the higher future stock returns that we also find.     

Audit pricing following mergers of accounting practices: evidence from Hong Kong

This study investigates what happens to audit fees after audit firms merge. In particular, we examine whether pre-merger fee premiums of the strong brand name auditor spread to the other auditor. Using data from Hong Kong we analyse the 1997 merger between Kwan Wong Tan & Fong (KWTF) and Deloitte Touche & Tohmatsu (DTT) to become DTT, and the 1998 merger between Coopers & Lybrand (CL) and Price Waterhouse (PW) to form PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). We find that DTT audit fees are 55% higher than KWTF prior to the merger and this premium falls to 41% in 1998 and to 34% in 1999. However, we find no increase in audit fees for incumbent property company clients, a sector where KWTF is the leading supplier. Prior to its merger. PW earned audit fees 16.4% higher than those earned by CL and the premium is even larger for clients in the consolidated enterprises and property companies sectors. We find no change in audit fees after the PwC merger. This result suggests that the PwC merger is a response to increased competition and clients are unwilling to pay higher fees for within-Big 5 re-branding.     

Oligopolistic markets with sequential search and production cost uncertainty

This article analyzes a sequential search model where firms face identical but stochastic production costs, the realizations of which are unknown to consumers. We characterize a perfect Bayesian equilibrium satisfying a reservation price property and provide a sufficient condition for such an equilibrium to exist. We show that (i) firms set on average higher prices and make larger profits compared to the scenario where consumers observe production costs, (ii) expected prices and consumer welfare can be non‐monotonic in the number of firms, and (iii) the impact of production cost uncertainty vanishes as the number of firms becomes very large.     

Transforming audit technologies: Business risk audit methodologies and the audit field

Business Risk Audit (BRA) methodologies have been promoted by a number of the large audit firms in response, they claim, to the challenges of the information age and corporate clients’ needs for assurance. This paper subjects their claim to critical scrutiny, drawing on the perspectives of neo-institutional theories of legitimacy, the sociology of professional knowledge and the sociology of science and technology. To bring into play new Business Risk Audit methodologies a number of the larger firms have sought, through their auditing practice, to renegotiate the bases of their professional identity and status within audit firms and to widen their jurisdictional claims over other areas of expertise. These moves have been accompanied by the legitimation and embedding of Business Risk Audit in revised constructions of the market for audit, in abstract academic knowledges, reforms of professional education, and professional regulations. In providing a constructivist account of Business Risk Audit technologies, we argue for a theory of audit change that recognises (i) the centrality of legitimation processes and (ii) the co-construction of audit technology and the audit field.