Event Details

Accounting and Finance Research Seminar by Rene Stulz, Ohio State University. Paper title: "Do Firms with Specialized M&A Staff Make Better Acquisitions?"

René M. Stulz | Everett D. Reese Chair of Banking and Monetary Economics Director, Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics (osu.edu)

Abstract

We open the black box of the M&A decision process by constructing a comprehensive sample of US firms

with specialized M&A staff from 2000 to 2017 and investigate whether firms with such staff make better

acquisitions. We find that specialized M&A staff is an economically important determinant of acquisition

performance measured by stock price reactions to announcements, long-run stock returns, operating

performance, divestitures, and analyst earnings forecasts. This effect is lower for firms with powerful or

overconfident CEOs. We provide evidence on mechanisms through which specialized M&A staff improves

acquisition performance. For identification, we use the staggered recognition of inevitable disclosure

doctrine as a source of exogenous variation in the employment of specialized M&A staff.

Keywords: Mergers and acquisitions, acquisitions, corporate takeover market, corporate development,

M&A staff

JEL classifications: G30, G34, G14, G24