T word ‘merger’ often is associated with a big company buying a smaller one or two large companies coming together. But it is not only large companies that can succeed through acquisitions—even startups can use mergers as an effective way to grow their businesses. As a small team leading the startup Ocimum Biosolutions, based in Hyderabad, India, a decade ago, my colleagues and I could have opt...

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. banking industry has seen a strong trend toward consolidation, partly because of state regulatory changes permitting out-of-state bank acquisitions. There were 6,157 bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between 1981 and 1994 (Rhoades [1996]). Consolidation of this magnitude has brought significant changes to the banking sector that are in themselves worth investi...

Excerpt] In the last two decades of the twentieth century the lodging industry experienced an unprecedented level of consolidation. In particular, mergers and acquisitions among lodging companies took place at record levels in the late 1990s. From 1982 through 2000 the industry saw a total of 57 acquisitions with an aggregate market value in the target companies’ stocks of over $53 billion doll...

Much foreign direct investment (FDI) takes the form of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). It is commonplace in finance to view acquisitions as manifestations of the market for corporate control. Following on that insight we propose a model of FDI in which headquarters bid to control overseas assets. We derive an equation for bilateral FDI stocks that resembles the recently developed fixed effects ...

Beyond customary business diligence, mergers in the healthcare arena must clear an array of federal and state regulatory hurdles and compliance risks that have grown more pronounced in recent years. Primary challenge are posed by: > Antitrust issues > Licensing and compliance practices > Data privacy and security > Payment and revenue stability > Cultural fit and post-merger integration managin...