Contingent future payments have gained a solid reputation as fundamental ingredients of business acquisition transactions. Earn-outs specifically are a species of contingent future payments that have proved helpful in a plethora of recent merger deals. An earn-out is payment for performance...

An important component of corporate governance is the regulation of significant transactions – mergers, acquisitions, and restructuring. This paper (a chapter in Oxford Handbook on Corporate Law and Governance, forthcoming) reviews how M&A and restructuring are regulated by corporate and...

Over 20 years, M&A contracts have more than doubled in size – from 35 to 88 single-spaced pages in this paper's font. They have also grown significantly in linguistic complexity – from post-graduate “grade 20” to post-doctoral “grade 30”. A substantial portion (lower bound ~20%) of...

This study investigates whether conference calls accompanying M&A announcements in Europe provide valuable information for capital market participants and hence induce an abnormal stock price revaluation on the bidder’s equity. Based on handpicked data for transactions between 2008 and 2012 we...

An intense academic debate has arisen recently concerning the crucial bedrock that underpins a corporate governance regime where widely-held public companies dominate. In the discourse, little has been said about the contribution of merger activity. The paper seeks to address this gap by...

A great merger wave occurring in the United States between 1897 and 1903 was the single most important event in a process that yielded the pattern of managerial control and dispersed share ownership which currently distinguishes America's corporate economy from arrangements in most other...

This paper shows that some managers systematically pay higher wages to rank-and-file workers and these managers are targets of M&As. We use a manager-firm-worker matched dataset covering the entire population of Denmark from 1995 to 2011, and develop a novel framework to identify manager fixed...

This paper investigates the impact of the target chief executive officer’s (CEO) postmerger position on the purchase premium and target shareholders’ abnormal returns around the announcement of the deal in a sample of bank mergers during the period 1990–2004. We find evidence that the...

We examine the conflict of interest that an investment bank faces when advising both the target and acquirer in a merger or acquisition (M&A) by investigating how common advisors affect deal outcomes. We compare M&As with common advisors to deals in which targets and acquirers use different...

Acquisition announcements generate predictable movements in the price of the acquirer's stock. For example, post-announcement returns are typically negative for high Tobin's q acquirers, stock transactions, and foreign targets, but positive for private equity-backed private targets....