Picking “Lemons” or Picking “Cherries”? Domestic and Foreign Acquisitions in Norwegian Manufacturing*

Abstract

We compare the performance in employment, wages and productivity for domestic plants acquired by new domestic and foreign owners. Prospective foreign owners pick large, high-wage, high-productivity plants, while new domestic owners choose average performers of above-average size. Employment, labour productivity, and total factor productivity decline in domestic acquisition targets before acquisitions; only wages recover afterwards. Employment, wages and labour productivity increase after foreign acquisitions. The sample selection introduced by long-term comparisons and a focus on unique events introduces a downward bias into the results for domestic acquisitions and an upward bias for the foreign acquisitions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.