This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the European takeover market. We characterize the main features of the domestic and cross-border corporate takeovers involving European companies in the period 1993-2001. We provide detailed and comparable information on the size and dynamics of...

This paper examines the magnitude and the sources of the expected shareholder gains in UK public to private transactions (PTPs) in the second wave from 1997-2003. Pre-transaction shareholders on average receive a premium of 40% and the share price reaction to the PTP announcement is about 30%....

This paper unveils the diversity in lock-in agreements of firms listed on the Nouveau Marche stock exchange in France. We give the main economic reasons why shareholders adopt lock-in agreements that are more stringent than legally required. We relate the abnormal returns and the abnormal volume...

This paper shows that a vibrant and economically important public-to-private market has reemerged in the US, UK and Continental Europe, since the second half of the 1990s. The paper shows recent trends and investigates the motives for public-to-private and LBO transactions. The reasons for the...

This paper examines the payout policies of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s. It complements the existing literature by analyzing the trends in both dividends and total payouts (including share repurchases). In a dynamic panel data regression setting, we relate target...

This paper examines the magnitude and the sources of the expected shareholder gains in UK public to private transactions (PTPs) in the second wave from 1997-2003. Pre-transaction shareholders on average receive a premium of 40% and the share price reaction to the PTP announcement is about 30%....

The paper examines the payout policy of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s. We complement the existing payout literature studies by analyzing jointly the trends in dividends and share repurchases. Unlike in the US, we find that, in the UK, firms do not demonstrate a...

We investigate the investment-cash flow sensitivity of a large sample of the UK listed firms and confirm that investment is strongly cash flow-sensitive. Is this suboptimal investment policy the result of agency problems when managers with high discretion overinvest, or of asymmetric information...

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows than UK and US firms. However, on a published profits basis, the pattern is reversed.Company law provisions and accounting policies account for these conflicting results. A partial adjustment model is used to estimate the implicit...

In this paper, we analyse the short-term wealth effects of large (intra)European takeover bids. We find large announcement effects of 9% for target firms and a cumulative abnormal return that includes the price run-up over the two-month period prior to the announcement date of 23%. However, the...