0000000000248229
AUTHOR
Miguel A. Latorre
Shareholder Wealth Creation in Response to Announcements of Acquisitions of Unlisted Firms: Evidence from Spain
We investigate shareholder value creation of Spanish listed firms in response to announcements of acquisitions of unlisted companies and compare this experience to the purchase of listed firms over the period 1991–2006. Similar to foreign markets, acquirers of listed targets earn insignificant average abnormal returns, whereas acquirers of unlisted targets gain significant positive average abnormal returns. When we relate these results to company and transaction characteristics our findings diverge from those reported in the literature for other foreign markets, as our evidence suggests that the listing status effect is mainly associated with the fact that unlisted firms tend to be smaller …
Do acquirers’ stock prices fully react to the acquisition announcement of listed versus unlisted target firms? Out-of-sample evidence from Spain
Previous results are ambiguous about whether prices fully reflect value creation or destruction at the time of the acquisition announcement when samples are split into listed and unlisted target firms. We find that the Spanish market fully reacts to the acquisition announcement (showing value creation only for unlisted target firm acquisitions), except for the smallest bidders of public targets since we find significant positive abnormal returns for a 24-month post-acquisition window. This evidence is consistent with investors extrapolating the performance of large acquirers of public firm to smaller ones and, therefore, only identifying value creation in the long term.
Investor Inattention to All-Cash Acquisition Announcements: A Joint Day-Time Analysis in the Spanish Market
Prior studies suggest that investors have limited attention, which determines the speed with which information is incorporated into share prices and, in turn, affects the efficiency of the markets. Unlike other corporate events, the information contained in an acquisition announcement is generally less standard and more complicated to process. Therefore, investor inattention is less likely around this event. In this study we test the existence of investor inattention for a sample of all-cash acquisition announcements of listed and unlisted target firms released by listed Spanish firms from 1998 to 2018. Cash acquisitions allow us to control for the strategic behavior of overvalued companies…