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University of Pittsburgh Associate Professors Sara B. Moeller and Frederik P. Schlingemann Coauthor Second Most Cited Article in the Journal of Finance According to ISI (Thomson Reuters)
The paper Wealth Destruction on a Massive Scale? A Study of Acquiring-Firm Returns in the Recent Merger Wave-exploring the cost of acquisitions to acquiring-firm shareholders-written by Sara B. Moeller and Frederik P. Schlingemann, both associate professors of business administration in the University of Pittsburgh's Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration, and colleague René M. Stulz, the Everett D. Reese Chair of Banking and Monetary Economics, from the Ohio State University's Max M. Fisher College of Business, is the second most cited article in the Journal of Finance over the past three years. The ranking is based on Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) citation data collected from the Journal of Finance over the last three years.
According to Moeller, Schlingemann, and Stulz, around the time acquisitions were announced in the years between 1998 and 2001, acquiring-firm shareholders lost 12 cents per dollar spent on the acquisition. That is a total loss of $240 billion from 1998 through 2001, compared to a $7 billion (or 1.6 cents per dollar spent) loss in all of the 1980s. The authors contribute this massive loss of wealth to a small number of acquisitions that resulted in negative synergy gains for firms with extremely high valuations. Had it not been for these acquisitions, the wealth of acquiring-firm shareholders would have increased. The authors reported that the firms that made these acquisitions with large dollar losses performed poorly afterward.
ISI was founded by Eugene Garfield in 1960. It is now a component of the Thomson Reuters Corporation. The ISI offers bibliographic database services and specializes in citation indexing and analysis. It maintains citation databases covering thousands of academic journals. The databases allow researchers to identify the articles that have been cited most frequently and who has cited them. The ISI publishes an annual Journal Citation Report for each of the journals it tracks, including the Journal of Finance.
The Journal of Finance is the official publication of the American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics. The journal publishes leading research across all the major fields of financial research. It is one of the most widely cited academic journals on finance as well as economics. Each of the journals six annual issues reaches more than 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world.
Moeller earned the Bachelor of Business Administration degree with majors in finance and economics at the University of Iowa's Henry B. Tippie College of Business, the Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree with a concentration in finance at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Graduate School of Management, and both the Master of Arts (concentration, finance) and a PhD in finance at the Fisher School. Before her career in academia, Moeller worked as a director of special projects at AJC International, a leader in the marketing of frozen and refrigerated food products, as well as in logistics and logistics services. Moeller managed and reengineered AJC's international commodity/branded distribution business and implemented a risk management and business segment analysis. From 1986 to1989, she was also a (district) commodity trader for Cargill, Inc., an international provider of food, agricultural, and risk management products and services.
Schlingemann earned his MBA and doctorate in finance at the Ohio State University. He received a Bachelors Degree and Masters Degree in economics from the University of Amsterdam. His teaching interests focus on corporate finance. Schlingemann's research interests revolve around the question of optimal financing and investment decisions in the corporation and how these decisions are linked. His research has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, BusinessWeek, and the New York Times, as well as on National Public Radio.
