Motives for partial acquisition: Evidence from the effects of CEO change on the performance of partially acquired U.S. target firms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A company may acquire shares in another corporation to discipline the target management and improve target performance, or to gain inter-corporate perquisites such as higher dividends and favorable business deals to the detriment of the other shareholders of the target firm. We investigate the change in the post-acquisition share and operating performance, the dividend policy, the liquidity, and growth prospects of U.S. firms whose shares were partially acquired by other corporations during 1995-2000, wherein the target firms remained independent publicly traded companies following the acquisition. Using a change in CEO post acquisition as a proxy for the extent to which the acquirer wishes to change the direction of the target management, we find that target firms where the CEO was retained show negative risk adjusted abnormal share returns and significant deterioration in operating performance after the acquisition while having a substantial increase in CEO compensation compared to those target firms that replace their CEO during the post acquisition period. This suggests that disciplinary motives may predominate where the acquisition leads to a change in CEO, while obtaining inter-corporate perquisites may be the motivation in acquisitions that do not lead to replacement of the target firm CEO. We do not find support for financial perquisites such as higher dividends that are subject to inter-corporate exclusion.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".