The Intangibles Song in Takeover Announcements: Good Tempo, Hollow Tune

Zoran Filipovic and Alexander Wagner
Additional contact information
Zoran Filipovic: Swiss Finance Institute; USI Lugano

No 19-03, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute

Abstract: Mergers and acquisitions are often motivated by the intention of creating value from intangible assets. We develop a novel word list of intangibles and apply it to takeover announcements. Deals presented with more “intangibles talk” complete more quickly. However, the value of these deals to the acquirer is questionable: One standard deviation more in intangibles talk results in 0.45 percentage points lower abnormal announcement returns of bidders. Agency problems explain little of these results. Instead, payment mode choices and insider trades suggest that intangibles talk reflects managerial overoptimism. Overall, takeover announcements can provide important information regarding the quality of deals.

Keywords: Corporate announcements; intangible assets; intangibles talk; mergers and acquisitions; takeovers; textual analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G14 G34 G41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 72 pages
Date: 2019-02, Revised 2019-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3330623 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The intangibles song in takeover announcements: Good tempo, hollow tune (2023)
Working Paper: The Intangibles Song in Takeover Announcements: Good Tempo, Hollow Tune (2023)
Working Paper: The Intangibles Song in Takeover Announcements: Good Tempo, Hollow Tune (2022)
Working Paper: The Intangibles Song in Takeover Announcements: Good Tempo, Hollow Tune (2022)
Working Paper: The Intangibles Song in Takeover Announcements: Good Tempo, Hollow Tune (2021)
Working Paper: The Intangibles Song in Takeover Announcements: Good Tempo, Hollow Tune (2021)
Working Paper: The Intangibles Song in Takeover Announcements: Good Tempo, Hollow Tune (2019)
Working Paper: The Intangibles Song in Takeover Announcements: Good Tempo, Hollow Tune (2019)
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:chf:rpseri:rp1903

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ridima Mittal ().