With the aid of conglomerate merger wave of the 1960s and the 1970s, the
conglomerate model with diversified business lines became viewed as an important facet
of American capitalism. Ravenscraft and Scherer (1987) provide evidence of the trend
toward diversification for American companies during this period.1
Stein (1997) and
Desai, Foley and Hines (2004) document how multinational and conglomerate can utilize
internal capital markets to overcome imperfections in external capital market and allow
conglomerate firms to allocate resources efficiently. Although Maksimovic and Phillips
(2002) using plant-level data from the U.S. census for the period 1974 to 1992, document
that conglomerate firms are less productive than single-segment firms of a similar size,
they find that plants of the largest segments of conglomerates with multiple segments are
particularly efficient. 2