Using merger announcements and applying methods from computational linguistics we find strong evidence that stock prices underreact to information in financial media. A one standard deviation increase in the media-implied probability of merger completion increases the subsequent 12-day return of...

We reexamine long-term abnormal returns for portfolios sorted on governance characteristics. Firms with strong shareholder rights and firms with weak shareholder rights differ from the population of firms and from each other in how they cluster across industries. Using well-specified tests under...

The efficient market theory is a central point in finance. If the capital market is competitive, the investors cannot expect superior gains from their investment strategies with respect to the risk profile. Event studies are an approach to verify the impact of the information on the stock...

The economic and monetary unification, the globalization of markets and the increasing use of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have increased the level of competition in all sectors of the economy by opening the way to processes of Mergers and Acquisitions between companies....

This paper analyzes Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) in Europe. We document various aspects associated with European SPACs by using a unique and hand-collected data sample encompassing all 19 SPACs which have been listed on European stock exchanges since 2005. The paper shows that...

The study introduces empirical evidence that there are statistically significant relationships between intensity of upcoming aggregate merger activity and the present values of the factors HML and SMB in the Fama-French three-factor model of assets pricing

We investigate the unique corporate governance structure of Australian private equity target firms to establish the disciplinary motive underpinning a corporate buy-out. We test our expectations using a sample of 43 publicly listed private equity target firms and a control sample of 182...

Using a global M&A data set, this paper provides evidence that the empirical observations relating public acquisitions to, at best, zero abnormal returns, and their stock-financed subset to negative abnormal returns for acquiring firms around the deal announcement are not unanimous across...

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,...

This paper introduces the QMIT LBO model and describes its salient characteristics. In addition to a 41% long term hit rate the Top 100 model predictions can be traded quite profitably as an equal weighted long portfolio. A Russell 2000 Value index hedge increases the Sortino ratio to ~2.5 over...