The Spillover Effect of Financial Information in Mergers and Acquisitions

Abstract In this study we investigate whether and how a firm’s investment activities are affected by the financial information of peer firms on merger and acquisition (M&A) efficiency. Using changes in M&A accounting performance to measure efficiency, we find a positive association between the post-M&A accounting performance of an acquiring firm and that of previous peer acquirers. We show that this spillover effect is derived from peer firms with improved rather than poorer post-M&A accounting performance. We also find that the spillover effect varies with the characteristics of both the acquiring and the peer firms. The effect is stronger when the peer firms are larger, are non-SOEs (vs. SOEs), have improved accounting performance after M&As and undertake M&As with unrelated (vs. related) entities, and when the acquiring firms are smaller, non-SOEs (vs. SOEs) and have poorer accounting performance before M&As.