Institutional and Legal Context in Natural Experiments: The Case of State Antitakeover Laws
研究发现，在利用州反收购法进行识别的研究中，企业的制度与法律背景（如其他州法律、企业已有防御措施、法院判决）对结果有重大影响，忽略这些因素会导致先前九项研究的结论发生显著变化。
ABSTRACT We argue and demonstrate empirically that a firm's institutional and legal context has first‐order effects in tests that use state antitakeover laws for identification. A priori, the size and direction of a law's effect on a firm's takeover protection depends on (i) other state antitakeover laws, (ii) preexisting firm‐level takeover defenses, and (iii) the legal regime as reflected by important court decisions. In addition, (iv) state antitakeover laws are not exogenous for many easily identifiable firms. We show that the inferences from nine prior studies related to nine different outcome variables change substantially when we include controls for these considerations.