Data on U.S. mergers and aquisitions from 1987 to 2006 indicate that firms with high market-to-book values (i.e., Tobin's Q) tend to merge with firms that have lower Q's, but that target Q's are on average higher than those of firms not involved in mergers at all. We capture this fact with a model in which the ratio of a bidder's Q to that of a prospective target has a non-monotone, inverted U-shaped effect on the probability of the two firms merging. Further, we find that the likelihood of a merger is positively and linearly related to the ratio of the growth potential of an acquirer and its prospective target. Using data from Compustat, a series of bootstrap logit regressions bear out these implications.
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Paper provided by Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University in its series Working Papers with number
0914.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Boyan Jovanovic & Peter L. Rousseau, 2002.
"The Q-Theory of Mergers,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 92(2), pages 198-204, May.
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