We study the role of hedge fund activists in curbing empire building. We show that firms with poor acquisition records are more likely to become activist targets. Following activist intervention, targeted firms make fewer acquisitions but obtain...Read more
M&A transactions are governed by contracts that exhibit constrained variation ? they are negotiated, yet full of boilerplate, tailored, yet full of patterns and regularities. This paper (a chapter of the Research Handbook on Mergers and...Read more
Using a hand-collected sample of 1,739 class actions that challenge the fairness of M&A transactions from the period 2003 through 2012, we examine the effectiveness of plaintiffs? law firms. We divide plaintiff law firms into top-10 and non-...Read more
Creeping acquisitions - grabs of a company?s de facto control without the launch of a
formal tender offer ? are an acquisition technique that presents many risks. Not only can stock prices be negatively affected in the short term (after the...Read more
Firms that buy distressed and bankrupt companies or some of these companies? assets
earn excess returns that are at least 1.6 percentage points higher than when they make
regular acquisitions. These returns come at the expense of the...Read more
An important component of corporate governance is the regulation of significant
transactions ? mergers, acquisitions, and restructuring. This paper (a chapter in Oxford
Handbook on Corporate Law and Governance, forthcoming) reviews...Read more
Shareholder voting on corporate acquisitions is controversial. In most countries acquisition decisions are delegated to boards and shareholder approval is discretionary, which makes existing empirical studies inconclusive. We study the U.K....Read more
We test the hypothesis that foreign direct investment promotes corporate governance spillovers in the host country. Using firm-level data from 64 countries during the period 2005-2014, we find that cross-border M&A activity is associated with...Read more
Do pre-offer target stock price runups increase bidder takeover costs? We present model-based tests of this issue assuming runups are caused by signals that inform investors about potential takeover synergies. Rational deal anticipation implies a...Read more
We study the impact of corporate networks on the takeover process. We find that better connected companies are more active bidders. When a bidder and a target have one or more directors in common, the probability that the takeover transaction...Read more
This study investigates deal initiation in the context of mergers and acquisitions. We investigate how bidder and target initiated merger offers differ. Our analysis reveals that target financial or economic weakness, target financial constraints...Read more
Facilitating cross-border mergers and acquisitions has long been one of the
objectives of European company law directives and regulations. This short essay
shows that the current European legal framework unnecessarily raises the...Read more