Leuven's Den Hoorn brewery, now AB Inbev SA, has become the world's largest brewing group by far, but critics say the company overpaid for its acquisitions. In this article, we study typical stock market reactions to the many takeover announcements by AB Inbev and the industry's runner-up, Heineken. Unlike Heineken's, the market leader's takeover announcements were met by, on average, a –2% price reaction in the stock market in the announcement month, but most of that is already undone in the next month. For Heineken, the same pattern shows up, only faster: the V-shaped reaction takes a few weeks rather than a few months. Such V-reactions may actually reflect a temporary rise in uncertainty rather than overpaying. The finding that reactions are reversed and heterogeneous across firms, raises issues of interpretation and optimal test design of event studies. (JEL Classifications: G12, G14, G17)

Through comparison of two families, Filipino and American, this essay finds that the axiomatic three-generational cycle of rise and decline, articulated famously by Andrew Carnegie, proved predictive for an American family firm but not for its Filipino counterpart. Over the span of a century, both families followed a surprisingly similar move from agriculture to food processing and then publishing. Thereafter, however, divergent state policies shaped different destinies for these two families. In the United States, impersonal enforcement of state security and economic regulation allowed the unchecked rise of finance capital that consolidated some 2000 US breweries, most of them family owned, into two transnational corporate conglomerates. In the Philippines, by contrast, persistent rent seeking by elite families, combined with personalised, partisan state economic enforcement, has allowed the continuing dominance of family-controlled corporations. Through comparison of two societies with close relations for over a century, we can see how state economic regulation can encourage the eclipse of major family firms in one society and the perpetuation of a political-economic oligarchy in another.

Excavations in Insulae II, III and XIII in the southern half of Verulamium demonstrated the absence of occupation prior to the late first century and the relatively late development of the street grid in this area. This forced a re-evaluation of the date of the 1955 ditch, suggesting it was not dug until the Flavian period. The excavations also demonstrated that Watling Street had never bisected Insula XIII on the south-eastern side of the Forum-Basilica, thus negating a major argument for the presence of a Claudian fort under the centre of the later town. A restricted excavation in the northern corner of Insula XIII revealed evidence for the location of the town’s baths, while excavation in Insula XIII revealed a long sequence of industrial and domestic occupation stretching from the late first to early fifth centuries. Evidence for continued occupation into the fifth century or beyond was recovered from Insula II, and to a lesser extent, in Insula XIII.