Mergers and Acquisitions, Abnormal Stock Returns and Investor Attention

Abstract

This article uses more than 1,000 M&A events in China's A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2017 as a sample to calculate the cumulative abnormal return rate of the corresponding stocks. Combining the methods of eventstudy, the results show that: in the event window, the cumulative abnormal return rate of cross-industry mergers and acquisitions is significantly higher than that of non-cross-industry cumulative abnormal returns. The overall sample shows a significantly positive cumulative rate of return, meaning that M & A events can increase shareholder wealth.The merger and acquisition events are classified according to asset restructuring, absorption merger and tender offer. The results show that the cumulative abnormal return rate of asset restructuring is significantly higher than the latter two categories. This result is also stable under the market model and the three-factor model. In order to explain the average cumulative abnormal return rate, this paper adopts the method of multiple regression to construct a regression model with investor attention as the main explanatory variable. At the same time, after controlling the effects of years and industries, the sample of XueQiu data measured by investors’ attention has been used as the main explanatory variable, and it has been found to have a significant positive correlation with the dependent variable CAR.