novel word list of intangibles and apply it to takeover announcements. Deals presented with more “intangibles talk” complete … overoptimism. Overall, takeover announcements can provide important information regarding the quality of deals …

Using merger announcements and applying methods from computational linguistics we find strong evidence that stock … merger completion increases the subsequent 12-day return of a long-short merger strategy by 1.2 percentage points. Filtering … merger arbitrage by 9.3 percentage points. Our results are particularly pronounced when high-yield spreads are large and on …