Acquirers do not benefit from hiring the CEOs of firms they buy, either in terms of merger announcement returns or long-run operating performance. This is especially true when the retained CEOs exhibit inferior quality (as proxied by target firm industrial efficiency or the target CEO's...

Economic (Bhagwat, Dam and Harford, 2016), political (Cao, Li and Liu, 2019), and policy (Nam and Hieu, 2017; Bonaime, Gulen and Ion, 2018) uncertainty affect merger and acquisition (M&A) activity. In this paper, we use Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) interventions in...

We find that a firm is more likely to engage in acquisitions when its private information, measured by changes in purchase obligations, predicts that future profitability will fall and thus that its shares are overvalued in the current stock market. Overvalued acquirers are as likely to pay with...

We show that a larger migrant stock from an acquiring country to a target country leads to greater deal frequency and dollar value in cross-border acquisitions after controlling for the differences in economic and financial development, regulatory environments, valuations, and cultural distance....

We connect the extensive theoretical negotiation and auction literature to real-world practice using a rich, hand-collected data set offering a comprehensive picture of high-stake merger and acquisition (M&A) negotiations for 322 deals that aggregate more than $2.4 trillion in deal value. We...