“Corporate Ownership and International Mergers and Acquisitions”
Professor Kai Li, Sauder School of Business
Abstract:
This paper employs a novel dataset of international mergers and acquisitions (M&As) for which we observe ownership structure of a target firm including the identity and country of origin of its controlling shareholder. We examine whether and how different types of controlling shareholders in target firms—individual(s)/family, industrial, financial, and government—as well as their domicile—domestic versus foreign—are associated with the incidence of cross-border M&As. We find that individual(s)/family and government owners are negatively associated with the incidence of cross-border M&As; while the opposite holds for foreign owners. After refining the categorization of domestic versus cross-border deals, we show that while foreign government owners are more likely to pursue “pseudo” domestic deals, foreign industrial and financial owners are more likely to engage in “genuine” international deals. We then explore economic mechanisms behind the observed associations by interacting target firm ownership structure characteristics with firm- and country-level factors such as size and age, and geographic, sociological, and cultural proximity measures. We conclude that the significant associations between corporate ownership and the incidence of cross-border deals are likely driven by both target firm fundamentals and its controlling shareholder’s preferences.