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Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Law and Society

2005

Empirical legal studies

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Fate Of Firms: Explaining Mergers And Bankruptcies, Clas Bergström, Theodore Eisenberg, Stefan Sundgren, Martin T. Wells Mar 2005

The Fate Of Firms: Explaining Mergers And Bankruptcies, Clas Bergström, Theodore Eisenberg, Stefan Sundgren, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Using a uniquely complete data set of more than 50,000 observations of approximately 16,000 corporations, we test theories that seek to explain which firms become merger targets and which firms go bankrupt. We find that merger activity is much greater during prosperous periods than during recessions. In bad economic times, firms in industries with high bankruptcy rates are less likely to file for bankruptcy than they are in better years, supporting the market illiquidity arguments made by Shleifer and Vishny (1992). At the firm level, we find that, among poorly performing firms, the likelihood of merger increases with poorer performance, …


Death Sentence Rates And County Demographics: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg Jan 2005

Death Sentence Rates And County Demographics: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The number of murders in a state largely determines the size of a state's death row. The more murders, the larger the death row. This fundamental relation yields surprising results, including the newsworthy finding that Texas's death sentencing rate is not unusually high. Recent state-level research also underscores the importance of race in the demography of death row. Death penalty research has long emphasized race's role, and with good reason--a racial hierarchy exists in death sentence rates. Black defendants who murder white victims receive death sentences at the highest rate; white defendants who murder white victims receive death sentences at …