Liquidity Mergers

Heitor Almeida, Murillo Campello and Dirk Hackbarth

No 16724, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study the interplay between corporate liquidity and asset reallocation opportunities. Our model shows that financially distressed firms are acquired by liquid firms in their industries even when there are no operational synergies associated with the merger. We call these transactions "liquidity mergers," since their main purpose is to reallocate liquidity to firms that might be otherwise inefficiently terminated. We show that liquidity mergers are more likely to occur when industry-level asset specificity is high (i.e., industry-specific rents are high) and firm-level asset specificity is low (industry counterparts can efficiently operate distressed firms' assets). We also provide a detailed analysis of firms' liquidity policies as a function of real asset reallocation, examining the trade-offs between cash and lines of credit. The model makes a number of predictions that have not been examined in the literature. Using a large sample of mergers, we verify the model's prediction that liquidity-driven acquisitions are more likely to occur in industries in which assets are industry-specific, but transferable across industry rival firms. We also verify the prediction that firms are more likely to use credit lines (relative to cash) when they operate in industries in which liquidity mergers are more frequent.

JEL-codes: G31 G32 G33 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01
Note: CF
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Published as Almeida, Heitor & Campello, Murillo & Hackbarth, Dirk, 2011. "Liquidity mergers," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(3), pages 526-558.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16724.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Liquidity mergers (2011)
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:nbr:nberwo:16724

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16724

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().