Acquirers do not benefit from hiring the CEOs of firms they buy, either in terms of merger announcement returns or long-run operating performance. This is especially true when the retained CEOs exhibit inferior quality (as proxied by target firm industrial efficiency or the target CEO's...

In acquisitions, target CEOs face a moral hazard: any personal gain from the deal could be offset by the loss of the future compensation stream associated with their jobs. Larger, more important, parachutes provide greater relief for these losses. To explicitly measure the moral hazard target...

Do merger bonuses to target CEOs facilitate a wealth transfer from target to acquirer shareholders? We test this hypothesis against an alternative that bonuses enable a useful contractual revision in compensation contracts when takeovers generate small synergies. When target CEOs get a merger...

Unscheduled stock options to target CEOs are a non-trivial phenomenon during private merger negotiations. In 920 acquisition bids during 1999-2007, over 13% of targets grant them. These options substitute for golden parachutes and compensate target CEOs for benefits they forfeit because of the...

Acquirer CEOs with experience in the target's industry supply chain (‘supply chain CEOs') are associated with wealth effects of first-order importance: they earn 1% higher merger announcement returns. Conversely, their targets get a lower share of the merger gains. Acquisitions by supply chain...

Full Paper is available at: "https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=2526509" https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=2526509In this Internet Appendix, we perform further tests in order (i) to assess the robustness of the main findings, (ii) to evaluate whether the magnitude of our results changes in different...

Firms covered by more analysts are more likely to become takeover targets and more likely to enter deals in which their acquirers initiate private merger negotiations. Moreover, when equity analysts' pre-acquisition price forecasts imply greater target undervaluation, target firms are more...