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 shows that country-level differences in creditor protection affect bond performance around cross-border M&A announcements. Using Eurobonds and a global sample of 1,100 cross-border M&As, we find that the bondholders of bidding firms respond more positively to deals that expose their...

Small acquirers enjoy announcement period returns that are significantly higher than announcement returns for larger acquirers, but small acquirers significantly underperform after the acquisition is consummated. We investigate why the market appears to “get it wrong” at the announcement of...

Recent decades have witnessed several waves of buyout activity. We find LBOs to be a significant concern for bondholders by showing that a) intra-industry credit spreads increase upon an LBO announcement, b) yields on bonds without event risk covenants are, on average, 21bps higher than those on...

This paper studies the effect of stock liquidity on blockholder governance. Conditional upon acquiring a stake, liquidity reduces the likelihood that a blockholder governs through voice (intervention) – as shown by the greater propensity to file Schedule 13Gs (passive investment) than 13Ds...

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...

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...

Option prices embed predictive content for the outcomes of pending mergers and acquisitions. This is particularly important in merger arbitrage, where deal failure is a key risk. In this paper, I propose a dynamic asset pricing model that exploits the joint information in target stock and option...

For mergers and acquisitions with a small failure probability, the average decline in target stock price if the deal fails is much larger than the average increase that accompanies deal success. Probability weighting implies that the deal failure probability of such target stocks will be...

Unit initial offerings are innovative way to finance corporate activities in capital markets and are usually conducted by companies that carry a high level of asymmetry information. The degree of information asymmetry insignificantly impacts the pricing at the IPO day in our sample. In addition...