The following post comes to us from Rui Albuquerque of the Department of Finance at Boston University; Miguel Ferreira, Professor of Finance at Nova School of Business and Economics; Luis Brandao Marques, Senior Economist at the International Monetary Fund; and Pedro Matos of the Finance Area at the University of Virginia.
In the paper, International Corporate Governance Spillovers: Evidence from Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we investigate whether the change in corporate control following a cross-border M&A leads to changes in corporate governance of non-target firms that operate in the same country and industry as the target firm. We focus on the strategic complementarity in governance choices between the target firm and its rival firms in the local market. We take the view that corporate governance is affected by the choice of other competing firms as in the models developed by Acharya and Volpin (2010), Cheng (2010), and Dicks (2012).
To provide guidance for our empirical analysis, we develop a simple industry oligopoly model, which captures the idea that rival firms operating in a given industry change their governance in response to competitive forces. The spillover effect occurs as firms in an industry recognize that corporate governance is used more efficiently by the target firm and therefore strengthen their own governance as a response. The model has two decision stages and builds on the work of Shleifer and Wolfenzon (2002) and Albuquerque and Wang (2008). In the first stage, outside shareholders choose firm-level governance (i.e., how much to monitor and limit of managerial private benefits), given the governance choices of other firms. In the second stage, firm managers choose output and the level of private benefits that they extract in the context of a symmetric oligopolistic industry. In the Nash equilibrium outcome, managers have an incentive to “overproduce” (because their private benefits increase with revenues) and industry-level profits are not maximized.