ABSTRACT
Jesse Markham noted that the collecting of data on mergers is “explosively cyclical”; in periods of high merger activity economists look harder for merger data. Markham analyzed the effect of this pattern on the conclusions about merger activity known at that time. This chapter examines two types of economy-wide studies of merger and acquisition activity. The first type of study uses aggregate statistics to analyze the time patterns of merger activity, often looking for evidence on merger waves. The paper by William Shugart and Robert Tollison is representative of this form of analysis. This second type of study uses Compustat, a popular firm-level database of financial statements. Shugart and Tollison question whether mergers occur in waves. They find no evidence of waves in the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) Large Merger series between 1947 and 1979. From 1947 to 1979 the FTC gathered data on mergers.
