Topic: International Trade and the Propagation of Merger Waves

Speaker: Jarrad Harford, Professor of Finance, Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington

Date: May 23 (Wednesday)

Time: 10:00-11:30am

Location: Building 4, Room 101

Language: English

Abstract:

Cross-border merger activity is growing in importance. We map the global trade network each year from 1989 to 2016 and compare it to cross-border and domestic merger activity. Trade weighted merger activity in trading partner countries has statistically and economically significant explanatory power for the likelihood a given country will be in a merger wave state, both at the cross-border and the domestic levels, even controlling for its own lagged merger activity. The strength of trade as a channel for transmitting merger waves varies over time and is affected by import tariffs cuts, Euro, EU, EEA, and WTO entry. Overall, the full trade network helps our understanding of merger waves and how merger waves propagate across borders.

About the speaker:

Jarrad Harford is the Paul Pigott - PACCAR Professor of Finance and Chair of the Finance and Business Economics Department at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. He earned his PhD in Finance with a minor in Organizations and Markets at the University of Rochester. His teaching focuses on core finance and acquisition analysis.

Professor Harford currently serves as a Managing Editor of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Corporate Finance. His primary research areas are mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance and payout policy, and he has published more than 20 papers on these topics in top finance journals.  In 2017, Pearson-Prentice Hall published the fourth edition of an undergraduate finance textbook co-authored by Prof. Harford.