Bill Cohan, Columnist

Naive Study Ignores That M&A Leaks Are Good: William D. Cohan

May 6, 2013 at 2:56 PM UTC

William D. Cohan, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of the forthcoming "The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities," as well as "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and the New York Times best-sellers "House of Cards" and "The Last Tycoons." Cohan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes frequently for the Financial Times, Fortune, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He worked on Wall Street as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker for 15 years. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. "The Last Tycoons" won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

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Normally, an academic study as inane as “M&A Confidential: What Happens When Deals Leak” would be dismissed for what it is: a blatant, lame attempt to gin up some public attention for its sponsors.

Yet things turned out differently this time -- it got a little notice largely because Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times’s DealBook and CNBC took a shine to it. The research is worth taking the time to debunk not just because of its superficiality but because there’s a chance it may be used as ammunition in calling for regulation or enforcement that would, in fact, be harmful to financial markets and investors.