We test whether stock liquidity affects acquirer returns through its hypothesized effect on institutional monitoring. We find that firms with lower stock liquidity have higher acquirer gains for takeovers of private, but not for takeovers of public targets. The negative relation between...

Documenting the US antitrust review process for M&As in detail, we unveil that regulatory costs and risks are significant and that mitigating these risks via lobbying by acquirers may benefit shareholders. Our results show that an adverse antitrust review outcome leads to a decline of 2.8...