Abnormal Long-Term Returns For The European Acquirers

Abstract

This thesis aims to evaluate British and the German acquirer returns since the 80s. This thesis will solely focus on public acquirers and evaluate the success of a takeover by its long term buy and hold abnormal returns. The existing literature in mergers and acquisitions is vast in a United States context and their markets but somewhat outdated or narrow in an European context. This thesis thus aims for updating existing literature but most of all to execute a broad evaluation of multiple variables and factors used in previous literature. This thesis will use the buy and hold abnormal returns methodology as its main method but adds a calendar time approach of the Fama and French five and six factor models to check the robustness of the results. This thesis further aims to give the reader a broad understanding of the very different approaches used in previous literature as well as methodologies.