Quantcast
Channel: The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 51

Do Firms With Specialized M&A Staff Make Better Acquisitions?

0
0
Posted by Sinan Gokkaya (Ohio University), Xi Liu (Miami University), and René M. Stulz (The Ohio State University), on Monday, June 7, 2021
Editor's Note: Sinan Gokkaya is associate professor of finance at Ohio University College of Business; Xi Liu is assistant professor of finance at Miami University; and René M. Stulz is the Everett D. Reese Chair of Banking and Monetary Economics at the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. This post is based on their recent paper. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes Are M&A Contract Clauses Value Relevant to Target and Bidder Shareholders? by John C. Coates, Darius Palia, and Ge Wu (discussed on the Forum here); and The New Look of Deal Protection by Fernan Restrepo and Guhan Subramanian (discussed on the Forum here).

Despite the importance of mergers and acquisitions (or just acquisitions for simplicity) for corporations and for the reallocation of capital within the economy, there is still considerable debate on whether firms create value for shareholders with these investments and why so many acquisitions appear to be unsuccessful. In an attempt to understand the drivers of acquisition performance, an enormous finance literature has focused on acquirer and target characteristics, on the incentives and characteristics of CEOs and directors, the nature of the deals, and so on. However, this literature has not penetrated inside the black box of the firm’s internal decision-making process for acquisitions, most likely because of difficulty in measuring organizational structure and skills pertaining to acquisitions. In our paper titled “Do firms with specialized M&A staff make better acquisitions?”, we open this black box by manually constructing a novel and comprehensive sample of US public firms employing specialized M&A staff from 2000 to 2017 and provide the first in-depth investigation of the impact of specialized M&A staff on acquisition outcomes.

(more…)


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 51

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images