The paper develops methods for analysing the effect of diversification across products on the risk profiles for retail and wholesale firms. In an application on Swedish wholesalers for alcoholic beverages we find that mergers and acquisitions tend to improve the risk/return profile. A large number of counterfactual product portfolios are used to evaluate the effect of e.g. country of origin and size of product portfolios on the overall risk.

Read the paper: All the bottles in one basket? Evaluating the effect of intra-industry diversification on risk

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