Are Stock-Financed Takeovers Opportunistic?

Are Stock-Financed Takeovers Opportunistic?

B. Espen Eckbo, Tanakorn Makaew, Karin Thorburn

Series number :

Serial Number: 
393/2013

Date posted :

November 01 2013

Last revised :

November 06 2018
SSRN Share

Keywords

  • takeovers • 
  • payment method • 
  • mispricing • 
  • capital structure • 
  • industryrelatedness • 
  • geographic location

The more the target knows about the bidder, the more difficult it is to pay with overpriced shares. Thus, under bidder opportunism, the fraction of stock in the deal payment is lower with better informed targets. We test this simple prediction using information proxies reflecting industry relatedness and geographic location specific to the merging firms.

We find instead that public bidders systematically use more stock in the payment when the target knows more about the bidder. While inconsistent with opportunism, this is as predicted when bidders are primarily concerned with adverse selection on the target side of the deal. Moreover, tests based on exogenous variation in bidder market-to-book ratios, identified using aggregate mutual fund outflows, also fail to support bidder opportunism. Finally, "cash-only" targets and potential competition from private bidders appear to place significant external pressure on public bidders to pay in cash.

Published in

Published in: 
Publication Title: 
Journal of Financial Economics
Description: 
Volume 128, Issue 3, June 2018, Pages 443-465

Authors

Real name:
Tanakorn Makaew