Full-Stock-Payment Marginalization in Merger and Acquisition Transactions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The number of merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions paid fully in stock in the U.S. market declined sharply after 2001, when pooling and goodwill amortization were abolished by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. Did this accounting rule change really have such far reaching implications? Using a difference-in-differences test and Canada as a counterfactual, this study reveals that it did. We also report several other results confirming the role of pooling abolishment, including (i) that the decrease in full stock payment relates to CEO incentives and (ii) that previously documented determinants of the M&A mode of payment cannot explain the post-pooling abolishment pattern. These results are also robust to controls for various factors, such as the Internet bubble, the exclusion of cross-border deals, the presence of Canadian cross-listed firms, the use of a constant sample of acquirers across the pooling and post-pooling abolishment periods, the use of Europe as an alternative counterfactual, and controls for the SEC Rule 10b-18 share repurchase safe harbor amendments of 2003. This paper was accepted by Shivaram Rajgopal, accounting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".