The following post comes to us from Peter Rousseau, Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University, and Caleb Stroup of the Department of Economics at Vanderbilt University.
It is well-known in finance and economics that firms possess private information about their own fundamental values. In our paper, Director Histories and the Pattern of Acquisitions, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we contribute to this literature by examining, in the context of the market for corporate control, how the transmission of non-public information about potential targets influences mergers and acquisitions. This is interesting because, despite extensive research on the determinants of acquisitions, we can still only imperfectly predict which firms will choose to initiate acquisitions and, for those that do, how they choose among potential targets.
We capture a potential acquirer’s exposure to target-specific non-public information by tracking the service histories of its directors over time. If a current director was formerly on the board of another firm, we say that the two firms have an historical interlock. We treat these directed firm-pair interlocks as containing information about the firm where the current director once served, and estimate the impact of this information on the decision to initiate an acquisition of that firm. Our main results indicate that a given firm is about five times more likely to initiate an acquisition of a historically-interlocked target than some other unlinked firm.
