50+ Years of Diversification Announcements

Mehmet E. Akbulut and John Matsusaka

The Financial Review, 2010, vol. 45, issue 2, 231-262

Abstract: This paper studies announcement returns from 4,764 mergers over 57 years to shed light on several controversies concerning corporate diversification. One prominent view is that diversification destroys value because of agency problems or internal investment distortions, but we find that combined (acquirer plus target) announcement returns are significantly positive for diversifying mergers throughout the period, and no lower than the returns for related mergers. The returns from diversifying acquisitions fell after 1980, and investors rewarded mergers involving financially constrained firms before but not after 1980, consistent with the idea that the value of internal capital markets declined over time.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6288.2010.00245.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:finrev:v:45:y:2010:i:2:p:231-262

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0732-8516

Access Statistics for this article

The Financial Review is currently edited by Cynthia J. Campbell and Arnold R. Cowan

More articles in The Financial Review from Eastern Finance Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().