Thursday, October 22, 2015

A Few Working Papers on Mergers (and Finance)

I just attended the Financial Management Association International meetings in Orlando, Florida.  The FMA also holds European, Asian and other meetings, but the one in North America is the annual one and draws a large crowd.  The FMA itself consists of over 7000 academics and practitioners interested in best practices in finance.  The way we find 'best practices' is typically through analyzing empirical data - often samples of thousands of observations to find out what is increasing value and what is not increasing value.  Topics analyzed range from all the aspects of mergers one can imagine to capital structure, dividend policy, agency theory, option pricing, investments, banking, regulation, working capital and much more.

 The working papers presented at this conference are just that - works in progress that will improve from the careful criticism of peers.  Ultimately, academics hope their working papers are published in leading academic journal and influence theory and practice.  Indeed, what we teach in the business schools is designed to be cutting edge practice and is (or should be) heavily influenced by current research and conditions.  Textbooks are three to five years out of date by the time they are published.

Rather than comment on individual papers, I am adding the link to the complete program which itself has links to individual papers.  This way readers can note the breadth of topics covered and choose those of interest.  Of course, you can find papers on any specific topic (i.e, mergers) with the search function (control + f on my computer).  Not all of these papers are at the stage where they are informative of 'best practices'.  Some of them are.  I sift through research carefully before presenting in executive education sessions but our next session in Amsterdam is in early December and my Drexel EMBAs in early January.  Many of my practitioner colleagues find scanning even the topics to be a way to stay current and get new ideas and in the best scenarios, get ahead of the competition.

All the best,

Ralph

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