Over the past few decades, the rapid growth of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) has received interest from academics and practitioners. While M&As continue to be the subject of thorough investigation from a corporate governance standpoint, comparatively less effort has been made to organize and...

We exploit cross-sectional variation in the predictable changes in asset volatility following corporate acquisitions to identify the effect of business risk on capital structure. We find that post-merger changes in leverage and cash holdings are strongly predicted by expected asset volatility...

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...

Specified Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are a special type of public companies currently available to investors in financial markets. As an investment vehicle, modern SPACs are traced back to 18th century England where blank checks were first mentioned as blind pools during the infamous...

This study documents the changes in the corporate design of modern Specified Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) for the years 2003 to 2012. Do institutional characteristics of SPACs determine the success of their merger outcomes? The paper finds that SPACs significantly redesigned their...

I compare the wealth of private firm owners that exit their firms through reverse mergers (RMs) to the wealth that could have been obtained in initial public offerings (IPOs), sellouts, or by remaining private. Private firm owners that use the RM exit mechanism have significantly less post-exit...

The present paper studies the impact of the SOX act to the choice of payment in Mergers & Acquisitions for firms with different capital structures. Use Probit and Tobit models to access the firms' pre-acquisition leverage levels as well as the leverage changes of firms because of the SOX act....

This paper studies how institutional characteristics of Specified Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are related to their post-merger survival. SPACs are unique financial firms that conduct the IPO with the solely purpose to use the proceeds to acquire another private company. Paper finds...

The aim of this paper is to study the influence of the Merger and Acquisition (M&A) payment method decision on the acquiring shareholders' M&A valuation, considering the relevance of the acquiring ownership structure and the legal and institutional environment, and the possibility that the...

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...