Pre-merger management in developing markets: The role of earnings glamor

Wei Huang, John W. Goodell, Hong Zhang

    Research output: Journal PublicationArticlepeer-review

    23 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    For a broad, 16-year sample of mergers by Chinese listed firms, we document that income-increasing earnings management through both discretionary accruals and real activities in the year immediately preceding mergers significantly increases the probability of deal payment all or partially in stock. Concomitantly, in contrast to Western developed markets, we find these share-for-share bidders outperform pure-cash bidders during times close to deal announcements; while over longer periods of time, similar to Western markets, underperform pure-cash bidders. Our results are consistent with bidder pre-merger earnings management leading to market expectations reflecting an over extrapolation of bidders' past performance. We interpret our results as acquirer firms in the Chinese developing market being able take advantage of informational voids by signaling. In this case, exploiting a known bias toward “glamor” stocks identified for Western markets by consciously establishing earnings glamor. Results should be of great interest to scholars interested in how known aspects of Western financial systems may or may not be similar in environments of greater institutional voids.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number101375
    JournalInternational Review of Financial Analysis
    Volume65
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Oct 2019

    Keywords

    • Chinese capital markets, institutional voids
    • Earnings management
    • Mergers

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Finance
    • Economics and Econometrics

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