A New Era of Midnight Mergers: Antitrust Risk and Investor Disclosures

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Barrios, John m.; Wollmann, Thomas g.
• 署名单位: Washington University (WUSTL); National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MICROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7669
• DOI: 10.1257/mic.20220064
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 77-111
• 关键词: efficient capital-markets; INFORMATION; FIRMS; acquisitions; cost; decline; ipos; US

摘要

Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anticompetitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise go undetected, creating disincentives for managers to divulge certain transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First, we employ a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effect of mandatory disclosures. We find that releasing information to investors poses antitrust risk. Second, we introduce a method for measuring undisclosed mergers that relies on financial accounting reporting requirements. We find that undisclosed mergers total $1.85 trillion between 2002 and 2016. ( JEL D22, G32, G34, G38, K21, L41, M41)