2018.5.6 What drives merger waves? Jarrad Harford 汇报人 孙毅

Abstract Aggregate merger waves could be due to market timing or to clustering of industry shocks for which mergers facilitate change to the new environment. This study finds that economic,regulatory and technological shocks drive industry merger waves. Whether the shock leads to a wave of mergers, however, depends on whether there is sufficient overall capital liquidity.

1 2 3 4 CONTENTS Introduction Literature review&hypothesis development Data and merger wave identification 4 Results

new environment, or whether such clustering is due to market timing. PART 01 This study asks whether a clustering of mergers at the aggregate levelis due to a combination of industry shocks for which mergers facilitate change to the new environment, or whether such clustering is due to market timing.

This macro-level liquidity component causes industry merger waves to cluster in time even if industry shocks do not.

Literature review and hypothesis development PART 02 Literature review and hypothesis development

Neoclassical hypothesis To summarize, under the neoclassical hypothesis, once a technological, regulatory, or economic shock to an industry’s environment occurs, the collective reaction of firms inside and outside the industry is such that industry assets are reallocated through mergers and partial-firm acquisitions. This activity clusters in time as managers simultaneously react and then compete for the best combinations of assets.

Behavioral hypothesis The behavioral hypothesis asserts that mergers happen when managers use overvalued stock to buy the assets of lower-valued firms. To generate a merger wave,this requires waves of high valuations for enough firms.

Data and merger wave identification PART 03 Data and merger wave identification

BUSINESS TEMPLATE Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing. The end result is 35 waves from 28 industries (seven of which have two distinct waves, one in the 1980s and one in the 1990s). The industries and their waves are described in Table 2. Over the 20-year sampling period, the average number of bids any one of these 28 industries sees in a 24-month non-wave period is 7.8 while the average number of bids it sees during a 24-month wave is 34.3.

PART 04 Results

I start with an examination of the two sets of factors predicted by the behavioral and neoclassical hypotheses to be associated with merger waves. One set of factors captures economic shocks to an industry’s operating environment. These factors are: cash flow margin on sales (cash flow scaled by sales), asset turnover (sales divided by beginning-of-period assets), research and development (scaled by beginning-of_x0002_period assets), capital expenditures (scaled by beginning-of-period assets), employee growth, return on assets (ROA), and sales growth. These variables are motivated by papers such as Healy et al. (1992), who look at efficiency measures affecting performance around mergers and Mitchell and Mulherin (1996), who examine sales, employment, and regulatory shocks and industry merger activity in the 1980s. One other potential economic characteristic, the market-to-book ratio, is ambiguous because it is also claimed by the behavioral hypothesis. The set of factors chosen to more directly examine the behavioral hypothesis’ reliance on market timing includes.

Conclusion The view supported here is that shocks, be they economic, regulatory, or technological, cause industry merger waves. Not all shocks will propagate a wave; sufficient capital liquidity must be present to accommodate the necessary transactions. This macro-level liquidity component causes industry merger waves to cluster even if industry shocks do not. While it would be disingenuous to claim that there are no mergers driven by managers timing the market, such mergers are not the cause of waves. Rather, aggregate merger waves are caused by the clustering of shock-driven industry merger waves, not by attempts to time the market.

THANK YOU