This survey introduces a two-volume, 1,900-page reprint collection of articles recently published by Elsevier/North-Holland journals. Volume 1 begins with a comprehensive overview of the empirical evidence, followed by introductions to the econometrics of event studies and various techniques for...

Reverse mergers are an alternative method to IPOs for going public and announcement day price reaction to reverse mergers is comparable to the initial day price reaction to IPOs. Most of the academic theories developed thus far to explain the market's reaction to IPOs, however, are not...

Research argues that short sellers are informed investors as current short selling relates inversely with future returns. However, empirical results have yet to determine whether short sellers trade on private information before, say, an upcoming negative new. This paper takes a step in this...

In this paper, we use call option prices to identify synergies and news from merger and acquisition (M&A) transaction announcements. We find that M&A announcements result in large and approximately equal gains to the bidder and the target on average, with the combined gains being large enough to...

We examine the characteristics of the sixth merger wave that started in 2003 and came to an end approximately in late-2007. The drivers of this wave lie primarily in the availability of abundant liquidity, in line with neoclassical explanations of merger waves. Acquirers were less overvalued...

Practitioners and academics have long assumed that financial markets value the deal-specific legal terms of public company acquisition agreements, yet legal scholarship has failed to subject this premise to empirical scrutiny. The conventional wisdom is that markets must value the tremendous...

There is little consensus regarding the overall performance of mergers and acquisitions in the banking industry. The goal of this paper is to investigate the change in operating performance, efficiency, and value addition of US bank mergers and acquisitions after GLBA. We extend the previous...

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...

A primary concern in mergers and acquisitions is the risk the deal may be cancelled before it is completed. We document that this ``interim risk" varies asymmetrically with the aggregate market return. Deals paid in cash tend to be renegotiated when the market rises but cancelled when the market...

This paper examines changes in acquirer and target companies' Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads as a proxy for default risk around official mergers and acquisitions (M&A) announce-ments. Related literature extensively documents wealth effects triggered by M&A from the shareholders' perspective,...