ABSTRACT This paper aims at shedding further light on the controversial impact of M&As on the value creation perceived by investors, as the short-term market performance of the firms involved. 17 event studies are examined by following a meta-analytical procedure. The unit of analysis is originally assumed as the event window within each study, yielding a total sample of 191 observations and 17,007 deals. Separate analyses are run for bidders, targets and combined entities. Our findings highlight the insensitiveness of bidders to M&As" announcement, in line with existing theory. Interestingly, the choice of the benchmark in the market model, the geographical scope and the event window position prove to be significant moderators: Italian M&As are less profitable than European ones, and preannouncement rumours significantly alter the overall performance.

Abstract: This paper examines a new issue in the tramp shipping industry – mergers and acquisitions – which has drawn firms into a competition on size, market share and total tonnage. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the behaviour of tramp shipping firms ’ stock returns, when they announce mergers and acquisitions, and how this is portrayed on their stock values. The methodology used is event study analysis and bootstrap. Our sample is constituted by member firms of NASDAQ and NYSE. The empirical results indicate the positive impact that announcements of mergers and acquisitions cause in tramp firms ’ stock returns. The impact of mergers and acquisitions is highly important and plays a key role for firms to follow new challenges in the shipping industry and create higher financial value.

Abstract. The great pace of merger activity that has involved financial institutions in

Perhaps the most important development in the financial services market of the past two decades has been the integration of the financial ser-vices sector. Deregulation, advances in communications and information technology, and economic forces have led to the breakdown of the “fire-walls ” that traditionally separated financial intermediaries such as commercial banks, thrift institutions, investment banks, mutual fund com-panies, and insurance companies. The European Union gradually deregulated the financial services sector through a series of banking and insurance directives, culminating in the virtual deregulation of financial services (except for solvency) in the Second Banking Coordination Direc-tive, implemented in the early 1990s, and the Third-Generation Insurance Directives, implemented in 1994.1 The objective of the banking and insur-ance directives was to create a single European market in financial services. The introduction of the euro in 1999 also profoundly changed the economic landscape for financial services firms in the European market. European deregulation in insurance was particularly important, because insurers tra-ditionally had been limited to operating within specific European countries, with little or no price competition and cross-border transactions limited mainly to reinsurance and some commercial coverages. The Third-Generation Insurance Directives introduced true price and product compe-

Original citation & hyperlink:

This study investigates the shareholders ’ wealth effects of mergers and acquisitions of Chinese and Indian acquiring companies. It examines market reactions to 157 Indian and 109 Chinese mergers and acquisition (M&A) deals with a value of at least US$1million during the period from 1999 to 2003. It is found that acquirers react positively with statistically significant bid announcement effects for the Indian sample for short window periods. However in a 301-day event window centred on announcement day, cumulative average abnormal returns for both samples are negative but statistically insignificant for Indian acquirers and statistically significant for Chinese acquirers. Another finding is that domestic M&As trigger higher wealth effects than cross-border operations for Indian acquirers while Chinese acquirers generate higher returns through cross-border M&As. Low market to book value ratio (MTBV) acquirers seem to out-perform high MTBV glamour acquirers based on both Indian and Chinese samples. There is strong evidence that the means of payment and tender offers have a substantial impact on the share prices of both Chinese and Indian acquirers. By way of policy implications of our findings, Chinese and Indian shareholders can use differential financing methods and varied wealth outcomes arising from investments based on style-characteristics of firms. For policy makers in these countries such as government authorities dealing with company mergers, they have an important role to play in creating a good competitive market environment for M&As.

Merger and acquisitions in the financial sector were very frequent over the last decade. In Europe the pace of M&A was fast. This process was driven by the consolidation of market-oriented policies in EU member countries, as well as by the expansion of the common market environment and the introduction of the Euro since 1999. The opening of new markets in former Communist countries also played a prominent role. We survey a large, comprehensive and original list of M&A operations that were concluded from 1997 to 2007 by banks and insurance companies of EMU countries. A sample of exchange-quoted firms from this list is then examined to assess whether M&A have changed the market risk profile of the acquirers, and to investigate if any variation can be traced to the cross-border or to the cross-industry character of the operation. To this purpose, we first estimate market risk differentials between different

The forest products industry in the U.S. has witnessed an unprecedented period of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the past decades. In this study, 57 major M&A events in the forest products industry were assessed by event analysis. By focusing on firm-level performance, financial data from the capital market were used to measure the impact of M&A events on the performance of firms. The abnormal returns implied capital market reacted positively to M&As in U.S. forest products industry as a whole, leading to a significant enhancement of the firms ’ market value. However, the acquiring firms experienced no significant response from the capital market. The results from cross-sectional regressions indicated that the position of a firm in the M&A event explained most of the variations of the cumulative abnormal return. The risk analyses for the acquiring firms in the selected 14 M&A events showed that the risk for most of them has experienced limited changes after the M&A events.