This paper studies the impact of bank mergers on firm-bank lending relationships using information from individual loan contracts in Belgium. We analyse the effects of bank mergers on the probability of borrowers maintaining their lending relationships and on their ability to continue tapping bank credit. The Belgian financial environment reflects a number of interesting features: high banking ...

We present fully general-relativistic simulations of binary neutron star mergers with a temperature and composition dependent nuclear equation of state. We study the dynamical mass ejection from both quasi-circular and dynamical-capture eccentric mergers. We systematically vary the level of our treatment of the microphysics to isolate the effects of neutrino cooling and heating and we compute t...

Creeping mergers are often cited as a problem in the context of concentrated industries, but practical competition law solutions are rarely suggested. Concern typically arises from a series of mergers which increase concentration in an industry but which do not individually cause substantial anti-competitive effects, particularly where the acquisitions are undertaken by a dominant firm. In Sout...

We present binary galaxy merger simulations with varying mass ratios and different progenitor morphologies. The simulations include mergers of gas-rich disks (Sp-Sp), of early-type galaxies and disks (E-Sp, mixed mergers), and mergers of early-type galaxies (E-E, dry mergers). We follow the dynamics of gas, stars and dark matter, and include radiative cooling, star formation and black hole (BH)...

We examine the incentives for firms to vertically integrate through vertical mergers and production. We develop a new firm-specific measure of vertical integration using 10-K text to identify the extent a firm’s products span vertically related product markets. We find that firms in high R&D industries are less likely to vertically integrate or engage in vertical mergers, and are more likely to...

We examine how product similarity and competition influences mergers and acquisitions and the ability of firms to exploit product market synergies. Using novel text-based analysis of firm 10K product descriptions, we find three key results. (1) Firms are more likely to enter restructuring transactions when the language describing their assets is similar to all other firms, consistent with their...

1.1 Ashurst LLP welcomes the opportunity to comment on the European Commission's ("the Commission") public consultation on "EU merger control – Draft revision of simplified procedure and merger implementing regulation" of 27 March 2013 ("the Proposal"). We regularly advise clients who are parties to mergers that are subject to the EU merger control regime or who are interested third parties in ...

Mergers redraw the boundaries of the firm. In this paper, we relate incomplete contracts to empirical regularities in the market for mergers and acquisitions. We begin by empirically challenging conventional wisdom about mergers and acquisitions: high M/B acquirers typically do not purchase low M/B targets. Instead, mergers typically pair together firms with similar M/B ratios. To show why this...

We derive analytic merger rates for dark-matter haloes within the framework of the Extended Press-Schechter (EPS) formalism. These rates become self-consistent within EPS once we realize that the typical merger in the limit of a small time-step involves more than two progenitors, contrary to the assumption of binary mergers adopted in earlier studies. We present a general method for computing m...

Using recent results from numerical relativity simulations of black hole mergers, we revisit previous studies of cosmological black hole spin evolution. We show that mergers are very unlikely to yield large spins, unless alignment of the spins of the merging holes with the orbital angular momentum is very efficient. We analyze the spin evolution in three specific scenarios: (1) spin evolves onl...