We provide direct empirical evidence that share overvaluation is an important motive for firms to make stock acquisitions. We find that more overvalued firms are more likely to acquire with stock, and acquirers are more overvalued in successful stock mergers than in withdrawn mergers. Acquirers'...

We demonstrate that firms that are more transparent pay less, in all components of issuance costs, to go public. We employ a sample of 334 previous leveraged buyouts and a characteristic-matched control sample to test the hypothesis that greater firm transparency before the issue decreases the...