Cross-Border Mergers & Acquisitions: A Piece of The Natural Resource Curse Puzzle

We combine the resource curse literature with the literature on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) to investigate two hypotheses, namely (i) natural resources wealth: countries with a comparative advantage in natural resources attract more M&As in natural resource intensive sectors and (ii) natural resources dependency: countries with a high natural resources dependency attract fewer M&As in all sectors. Using the Thomson dataset we test these hypotheses for a sample of 49 African and Latin American countries in the period 1988 - 2007. To test these hypotheses we disaggregate the data in sectors intensive and not intensive in natural resources. We emphasize the distinction between resource dependency and wealth. Both hypotheses were confirmed by our findings. Thus, resource dependency has a “crowding out” effect on M&As in all sectors, and natural resources wealth has a "crowding in" effect on M&As in sectors intensive in natural resources.