Reverse termination fees (RTFs) are required payments by bidders when they “walk away” from a merger or acquisition, and vary significantly in size and design. In a large sample of manually collected U.S. deal contracts involving publicly traded bidders and targets, we examine the...

Using a novel dataset of news events for 170,000 entities across over 100 countries, we find that media sentiment plays an important role in the market for merger and acquisition. Firms with high media sentiment are more likely to become an acquirer. The effect of media on the likelihood of an...

Newly public firms may provide misleading information about their business plans in their initial public offering (IPO) prospectuses. Using textual analysis, we develop a simple measure of such misleading information based on the difference between the emphasis placed on business lines in the...