In 1952, Nobel Laureate Harry Markowitz, . . . , demonstrated mathematically why putting all your eggs in one basket is an unacceptably risky strategy and why diversification is the nearest an investor or business manager can ever come to a free lunch. That revelation touched off the intellectual movement that revolutionized Wall Street, corporate finance, and business decisions around the worl...

Diversification continues to be an important strategy for corporate growth and better financial performance. The relationship between the diversification strategy and profitability as well as diversification and market power has been explored by a number of studies for the developed economies. The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between diversification and a firm’s f...

In the presence of corporate taxes and default costs, mergers can realize purely financial synergies due to reduced risk and the potential for greater leverage, as suggested by Lewellen (1971). But his conclusion that mergers always create positive financial synergies is incorrect: when firms have quite different risks or default costs, the loss from no longer being able to fit different capita...

In 1952, Nobel Laureate Harry Markowitz, . . . , demonstrated mathematically why putting all your eggs in one basket is an unacceptably risky strategy and why diversification is the nearest an investor or business manager can ever come to a free lunch. That revelation touched off the intellectual movement that revolutionized Wall Street, corporate finance, and business decisions around the worl...

Should lenders diversify, as suggested by the financial intermediation literature, or specialize, as suggested by the corporate finance literature? I model a financial institution’s (“bank’s”) choice between these two strategies in a setting where bank failure is costly and loan monitoring adds value. All else equal, diversification across loan sectors helps most when loans have moderate exposu...