This study documents economically meaningful and persistent financial advisor fixed effects in target firms’ abnormal stock returns shortly prior to takeover announcements.Additional difference-in-differences analyses suggest that advisors are associated with lower pre-bid stock returns after...

This paper analyzes capital market reactions to international bank M&A. We investigate combined stock return patterns of targets, bidders, and their peers upon takeover announcement, and closing or withdrawal. We distinguish five common M&A hypotheses and relate characteristic and mutually...

In this paper we investigate the performance of the Austrian banks which have, either actively or passively, participated in a domestic intra-banking merger or acquisition operation since 1995. For this purpose we apply the DEA methodology in combination with a Tobit regression approach to...

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...

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 find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger profitability of targets, a decrease in the size of acquirers...

This paper studies the bilateral drivers of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between European banks. Two findings document that banks use M&A as a device to leverage their expertise rather than to diversify. (i) Following the literature on matrimonial matching by using a binary logit model, the...

This paper examines how the distribution of target ownership is related with takeover premium in owner-manager dominant acquisitions, in which a firm is managed by managers and directors nominated and directed closely by controlling shareholders. We find that there exists the agency problem...

This study analyzes the effectiveness of the Market Abuse Directive (MAD) in reducing possible profits from insider trading during voluntary tender offers with the purpose of delisting initiated by controlling shareholders. Exploiting the quasi-experimental setting provided by the introduction...

Largely constant average acquirer returns over the past four decades mask fundamental changes in the takeover market. Controlling for bidder composition, the common component of acquirer returns has increased by five percentage points relative to the 1980s. Offsetting this increase, the average...