In this revealing study Frank Lichtenberg uses Census Bureau and other data on hundreds of business transactions during the 1970s and 1980s to examine the effects of changes in corporate control on productivity. The 1980s saw explosive activity in the arena of corporate takeovers. In this revealing study Frank Lichtenberg uses Census Bureau and other data on hundreds of business transactions during the 1970s and 1980s to examine the effects of changes in corporate control on productivity. He concludes that the restructuring of the U.S. economy during the past decade has contributed to higher productivity and increased international competitiveness. Corporate Takeovers and Productivity examines the effects of mergers and acquisitions, in general, and leveraged buyouts, in particular on a number of important, interrelated variables: on the productivity and market share of manufacturing plants, on fixed and R&D investment, on the employment and wages of both blue- and white-collar workers, and on corporate diversification. Among Lichtenberg's findings are that the least productive plants are most likely to change owners - a change that tends to raise productivity performance; that takeovers significantly reduce the employment and wages of white-collar workers (except R&D personnel) but not of blue-collar workers; that industrial consolidation is one source of the productivity gains from takeovers; and that the U.S. LBOs and foreign mergers and acquisitions do not have the same effects as U.S. mergers and acquisitions.

Research into firm growth has been accumulating at a terrific pace, and Alex Coad s survey of this multifaceted field provides a detailed, comprehensive overview of the latest developments. Much progress has been made in empirical research into firm growth in recent decades due to factors such as the availability of detailed longitudinal datasets, more powerful computers and new econometric techniques. This book provides an up-to-date catalogue of empirical work, as well as a coherent theoretical structure within which these new results can be interpreted and understood. It brings together a large body of recent research on firm growth from a multidisciplinary perspective, providing an up-to-date synthesis of stylized facts and empirical regularities. Numerous empirical findings and theories of firm growth are also surveyed and compared in order to evaluate their validity. Drawing on a vast and diverse body of research, this book will prove invaluable to students, academics, policy makers and practitioners with a need to keep abreast of studies in industrial organization, firm growth and management.

John Sutton sets out a unified theory that encompasses two major approaches to studying market, while generating a series of novel predictions as to how markets evolve. Traditionally, the field of industrial organization has relied on two unrelated theories—the cross-section theory and the growth-of-firms theory—to explain cross-industry differences in concentration and within-industry skewness. The two approaches are based on very different mathematical structures and few researchers have attempted to relate them to each other. In this book, John Sutton unifies the two approaches through a theory that rests on three simple principles. The first two, a "survivor principle" that says that firms will not pursue loss-making strategies, and an "arbitrage principle" that says that if a profitable opportunity is available, some firm will take it, suffice to define a set of possible outcomes. The third, the "symmetry principle," says that the strategy used by a new entrant into any submarket depends neither on the entrants identity nor on its history in other submarkets. This allows researchers to bring together the roles of strategic interactions and of independence effects. The result is that the considerations motivating the cross-section tradition and those motivating the growth-of-firms tradition both drop out within a single game-theoretic model. This book follows Sutton's Sunk Costs and Market Structure, published by MIT Press in 1991.

This book covers the consolidation and merger of corporations and corporate divestiture in the United States.

Carolin Decker develops and empirically applies a framework in which business exits serve the purpose of re-establishing a firm’s previously harmed legitimacy. Her findings support the idea that legitimacy needs drive the likelihood of fit-enhancing business exits in divesting firms.