Firm Size, M&A Announcement Returns and the Financial Crisis

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Volume Title

School of Business | Bachelor's thesis

Date

2019

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Rahoitus

Language

en

Pages

27

Series

Abstract

Prior academic literature has found evidence that there is a significant difference in the announcement returns between small and large acquirers. I examine a sample of 24,870 U.S.-based acquisitions between 1980 and 2017. The sample consists of transactions where a public company acquires the entire share capital of a private or public U.S. company. The equally-weighted abnormal announcement return for acquiring companies is 1.5%. The announcement return for the shareholders of large acquirers is almost three percentage points lower than the return for small acquirers. These results support the previous findings obtained by Moeller, Schlingemann, and Stulz (2004) and are robust to deal and firm characteristics. Small acquirers exceed the performance of large acquirers over the sample period; however, large acquirers seem to perform relatively better during the financial crisis.

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Thesis advisor

Joenväärä, Juha

Keywords

Acquisitions, Size effect, Financial crisis, Event study

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