Corporate Divestiture Decisions and Long-Run Performance

Abstract

We examine the post-divestiture long-run performance of two different choices of corporate divestiture, asset sell-offs versus equity carve-outs, and find that the choice of divestiture methods has important implications for the post-divestiture long-run performance. Our findings show that the post-divestiture long-run abnormal returns of sell-off parents are significantly higher than those of the carve-out parents. Furthermore, we find a positive relationship between the post-divestiture long-run returns and the diversification discount. The effect of the diversification discount is weaker for divesting parents with higher levels of R&D. Our results also provide evidence that a firm’s pre-divestiture number of segments, its unrelatedness to the divested unit, and its level of asymmetric information are positively related to the probability of choosing the asset sell-off method.