Global ownership patterns

Asier Mariscal

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2021, vol. 131, issue C

Abstract: To analyze multinationals’ market entry, I assemble a new dataset of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) for 1985–2019, with sales for the parent and target firms. Seven main facts emerge: (1) the number of acquisitions per parent has a Pareto distribution; (2) the number of different industries and countries entered per parent has a similarly shaped Pareto distribution; (3) parents entering unpopular industries or countries are large, as measured by global sales; (4) at the parent level, the number of industries and the number of countries entered is highly correlated; (5) the percent of zero parent-level M&A flows across destination industry-countries is 99%, and obeys a gravity relation; (6) single-industry and single-country parents are very prevalent (around 50%), but their sales share is low (around 10%); (7) there is positive assortative matching between parent and target sales. A balls-and-bins model (à la Armenter and Koren, 2014) quantitatively matches many of the facts due to the sparsity of M&A data. Three unmatched facts provide information for future theories: parent entry by market popularity, single-market multinational parents’ prevalence and sales share, and assortative matching between parent and target sales.

Keywords: Multinational corporations; Mergers and acquisitions; Firm-level data; Multinational production; Probabilistic model; Pareto distribution; Quantitative analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165188921001482
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:dyncon:v:131:y:2021:i:c:s0165188921001482

DOI: 10.1016/j.jedc.2021.104213

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control is currently edited by J. Bullard, C. Chiarella, H. Dawid, C. H. Hommes, P. Klein and C. Otrok

More articles in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().