Takeover Motives during the Conglomerate Merger Wave

John Matsusaka

RAND Journal of Economics, 1993, vol. 24, issue 3, 357-379

Abstract: This article examines the stock market response to acquisition announcements during and immediately after the conglomerate merger wave of the late 1960s. The main finding is that acquirer shareholders benefited from diversification acquisitions, which implies that diversification was not driven by managerial objectives. It is also shown that the market responded positively to bidders who retained the management of target companies and negatively to bidders who replaced target management. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the market favored acquisitions intended to exploit managerial synergies. It suggests that the market disliked takeovers that were motivated to discipline target management. Evidence on buyer and target price-earnings ratios is presented that is inconsistent with the conjecture that conglomerates were able to mislead investors by earnings-per-share manipulation.

Date: 1993
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (110)

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0741-6261%2819932 ... O%3B2-1&origin=repec full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

Related works:
Working Paper: Takeover Motives During the Conglomerate Merger Wave (1991)
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:rje:randje:v:24:y:1993:i:autumn:p:357-379

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://editorialexp ... i-bin/rje_online.cgi

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in RAND Journal of Economics from The RAND Corporation
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().