The acquisition motive of newly credit rated firms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A large body of research documents an increased acquisition activity among credit rated firms. We examine whether firms seek an initial credit rating to conduct large scale acquisitions, and whether this acquisition activity is driven by empire building or value creation motives. First, we find that acquisitions are a credible motive for seeking a credit rating, initially rated firms are associated with 13.05pp greater acquisition likelihood and these transactions are more likely to be settled by cash. Second, to recoup the costs of becoming rated, firms conduct large-scale high-quality acquisitions associated with 1.52pp higher acquirer announcement returns, where the higher cumulative abnormal returns are concentrated among firms obtaining a speculative grade initial rating. Third, following the initial rating year, acquisition activity dampens to pre-rating levels. In sum our findings lend support to the notion that previously financial constrained firms enter the bond markets to complement bank financing when conducting large value enhancing acquisitions.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".