Mergers and acquisitions are part of the fabric of business and economic life: they help drive growth in companies of all sizes. Most executives will at some point in their careers experience a takeover, as buyer, seller or intermediary. Yet, despite M&A's obvious attractions, deals often fall...

The extant empirical evidence suggests that defined benefit (DB) pension obligations, deficits, and costs increase corporate leverage and cost of capital, reduce corporate investment and aggravate valuation uncertainties. In the M & A context, DB schemes of target firms may reduce the takeover...

This paper develops a new scoring methodology to determine a country's capability to develop and sustain mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity on the basis of publicly available and continuously updated information. The study computes a theoretically grounded maturity index for M&A purposes...