This article revisits the protectionism hypothesis related to the European merger regulation (EMR). In the 1990s, EMR was biased against foreign acquirers, especially if the deal harmed domestic rivals (i.e., protectionism). At the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st, the...

We provide evidence on the impact of globalization on labor market outcomes analyzing pay differences between foreign-acquired and domestically-owned firms. For this purpose, we use firm level data from 16 European countries over the time period 1999-2006. Applying propensity score matching...

This paper analyzes Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) in Europe. We document various aspects associated with European SPACs by using a unique and hand-collected data sample encompassing all 19 SPACs which have been listed on European stock exchanges since 2005. The paper shows that...

The brewing industry has recently experienced increased merger activity. This paper analyzes the shortterm wealth effects of horizontal mergers and acquisitions on acquirers in the brewing industry. Based on a sample of 69 takeover announcements between 1998 and 2010, significant positive...

Prior research has addressed the question of whether certain events cause a transfer of wealth between stockholders and bondholders but does not control for the events' impacts on firms' credit risk. This may explain why many studies fail to identify wealth transfers. By employing announcements...

This paper documents inefficient pricing in deal spreads of European M&A targets. Despite a heterogeneous takeover environment we find no significant difference between spreads of domestic and European cross-border transactions. This deal spread parity suggests an equivalent degree of arbitrage...

Using a global M&A data set, this paper provides evidence that the empirical observations relating public acquisitions to, at best, zero abnormal returns, and their stock-financed subset to negative abnormal returns for acquiring firms around the deal announcement are not unanimous across...

We study the role of institutional investors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We find that foreign institutional ownership is positively associated with the intensity of cross-border M&A activity worldwide. Foreign institutional ownership increases the probability that a merger...

Using a large sample of cross-border mergers we measure the effect of a change in location on systematic risk. When a target firm's location moves a large part of its systematic risk switches from being related to its home equity market to that of the acquirer. On average the change in betas is...