Business Commons^™

Corporate Investment Activity, Industrial And Global Diversification And Internal Capital Markets, Ozgur Berk Kan

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Recent empirical studies document the average industrially diversified firm trades at a discount than a portfolio of comparable single-segment firms while geographically diversified firms are shown to face similar, if not higher, discounts. They attribute the diversification discount to inefficient allocation of capital in diversified firms. Most of this literature uses aggregate capital expenditures and cash flows data across divisions obtained from Compustat industry-segment and geographic-segment data tapes. In our first paper, we employ firm-specific data to examine the pre- and post-acquisition performance of firms engaging in diversifying and non-diversifying investments in order to determine whether the diversification discount may …