Shareholder voting on corporate acquisitions is controversial. In most countries acquisition decisions are delegated to boards and shareholder approval is discretionary, which makes existing empirical studies inconclusive. We study the U.K. setting where shareholder approval is imposed...

This paper offers new evidence on informed trading around merger and acquisition announcements from the UK equity and options market. The analysis suggests that in about 25%-33% of events there is abnormal option trading volume during the month that precedes the announcement. Such evidence is...

Prior research shows that religion promotes honesty. Honesty in turn motivates managers to view an expropriation from shareholders as self-serving, opportunistic, and unethical, thereby alleviating the agency conflict. Religious piety is thus expected to discourage agency-driven acquisitions...

This note examines whether prices fully reflect value creation or destruction at the time of the acquisition announcement when samples are split into listed and unlisted target firms as previous international results are ambiguous about this subject. We find that the Spanish market fully react...

Cash-rich bidders in UK have better announcement abnormal returns than cash-poor ones during 1984-2007, contrasting previous findings in the US. The positive cash reserve effect is mainly from bidders of high long-run growth or those with non-trivial institutional holdings. Moreover, cash-rich...

We show that the characteristics of serial acquirers are very different from those studied in prior research. Specifically, we find four major types of acquirers common in the data – loners, occasional acquirers, sprinters, and marathoners. Importantly, these acquirers can be distinguished on...