Mergers and acquisitions are often motivated by the intention of creating value from intangible assets. We develop a novel word list of intangibles and apply it to takeover announcements. Deals presented with more “intangibles talk” complete more quickly. However, the value of these deals to...

This article examines the presence of the reference price effect in mergers and acquisitions in Russia, which can act as a distortion in investor perception of the influence a deal has on a company. In this study we use the Russian market as a laboratory for the investigation of behavioral...

We use the unique setting of Malaysian mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity to test the effect of market-wide investor inattention when managers are attentive. During Ramadan, mainly Muslim investors are likely to be distracted while mainly non-Muslim managers are likely to be attentive and...

In this paper, I define employee morale as employees’ attitudes toward and perceptions of the tasks employees have in the companies they work for and various firm dynamics. I explore how employee morale affects merger probability, post-merger value, performance, integration, and merged firm...

We develop a novel measure of target shareholders’ average purchase price (TAPP). In a sample of all U.S. public firm merger offers from 1990 to 2019, we find that: (1) the offer premium is positively correlated with the ratio of TAPP to the target’s pre-offer stock price; (2) TAPP dominates...

Using merger documents filed with the SEC from 1994 to 2018, we show that being selected by investment banks as “comparable peers” are more than twice as likely to become a target themselves in the future compared to control firms matched for industry and size. They also experience an...

We study whether social media can play a negative information role by impeding price discovery in the presence of highly speculative rumors. We focus on merger rumors, where most do not materialize. We find that merger rumors accompanied by greater Twitter activity elicit greater immediate...

We examine the impact of shared auditors, defined as audit firms that provide audit services to a target and its acquirer firm prior to an acquisition, on transaction outcomes. We find shared auditors are observed in nearly a quarter of all public acquisitions and targets are more likely to...

This paper seeks to challenge the present rhetoric used by competition policy makers and enforcers when advancing economic efficiency as a goal of competition policy. The fixation on the promotion of economic efficiency and intense or fierce competition comes at the expense of other sensible...

The paper deals with cross-border mergers that may be performed either out of or into the Czech Republic and focuses on the accounting and tax aspects of these transactions. Attention was also paid to the most important legal requirements imposed on merger projects and the net assets valuations....