Mergers and acquisitions have become very popular in recent decades for firms seeking competitive advantage. The high failure rates of these initiatives make a closer look at the influence of the human factors and their complexity on these change activities necessary. This study traces the development of merger and acquisition activities in four companies, with a particular focus on individuals’ sensemaking over time and on the influence of human functional factors on the process and the outcomes of the mergers reviewed. A qualitative case-study approach is adopted with sixteen in-depth semistructured interviews in four post-merger organisations. The analysis of the collected primary data is done through a descriptive analysis of each individual case and a cross-case analysis of the four investigated cases. The findings show that there is a direct influence of the researched human functional elements and of the individual sensemaking on both the process and outcomes of the reviewed merger and acquisition cases. Based on the findings, a human functional merger and acquisition model – reflecting the interaction and influence of the human functional elements – and a management guideline for adopting this, are developed. This study provides a review of the influence of some significant organisational and individual human functional elements, such as leadership, communication, decision-making, relationship, and individual beliefs, values, attitudes and learning on the process and outcome of mergers and acquisitions. Such an investigation of these elements and their complexity, interaction with and influence on the process and outcome of change initiatives, and more specifically in the context of mergers and acquisitions, has not been undertaken previously.

In the economy intangible assets have become more and more important. Financial standards have evolved in order to capture this change and to be relevant. IFRS are international financial accounting standards with the goal to provide investors relevant information in their investment decision process.  Since 2005, all listed companies in the European Union have to implement the IFRS 3; Forcing companies to write off their goodwill instead of amortizing it. The goal of this measure was to provide investors more information about management’s investment decisions. Beside, companies proceed to firm acquisitions in order to gain a competitive advantage. Such events are important in companies’ life and are impacting the potential value creation. Out of that reason, investors are reacting to acquisition announcements. Moreover, the market reacts to goodwill impairments.   The purpose of this research was to examine to what extent the market reaction of an acquisition announcement can predict goodwill impairment in the two following years. This study was conducted using a quantitative method; focusing on aspects of the financial statements of 43 companies from the Nordic countries that acquired companies in the G20 countries. A Spearman’s correlation, logistic and linear regressions were pursued in order to observe the correlation and the strength of the relationship between goodwill impairment and the market reaction.   The findings imply that the market reaction can predict goodwill impairment in the first year after an acquisition in case of positive market reaction. Additional to that, it can also predict the amount of impairment in the second year, but not whether the impairment is happening. Also, there is a correlation between the first and second year goodwill impairments. However, the results of this research indicate that neither the industry, financial or non-financial, nor the deal value can predict goodwill impairment after an acquisition.

This PhD thesis consists of three empirical papers. Each paper can be read independently. However, all three papers investigate different factors affecting the performance of firms involved in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and initial public offerings (IPOs). A private firm seeking to become listed and who also wish to grow through acquisition can do so with an IPO followed by acquisitions or a reverse takeover (RT). In a RT, a private firm is acquired by a public firm, but the private firm controls the combined public entity after completion of the deal. Chapter 2, 'Post-acquisition performance when firms list and acquire simultaneously versus sequentially: Reverse takeover versus IPO-M&As', examines the differential performance of firms conducting an IPO prior to undertaking follow-on acquisitions (IPO-M&As) versus firms that combine the process of obtaining the listing and acquiring another firm by conducting a RT. I investigate how acquirers' choices affect their post-acquisition performances. In this paper, I also investigate the impact of board structure changes on firm performance in IPO-M&A and RT deals. This event study covers RTs and acquisition-motived IPOs listed on the London Stock Exchange during 1995-2012. Challenging the theoretical expectation that IPOs increase the likelihood of optimal exercise of acquisition options by reducing valuation uncertainty, my results show that an IPO does not alleviate the stock market underperformance of acquirers within 3 years post-acquisition. Private firms seem to self-select into different listing-and-acquisition routes depending on firm-specific characteristics and the board members keep the same level of control preference. However, the choice of listing-and-acquisition does not appear to significantly affect performance. I find no significant difference in the post-acquisition performance of firms undertaking IPO-M&As or RTs. Chapter 3, 'Post-acquisition performance of target firms: The impact of management turnover', investigates the efficiency of the takeover market and the impact of management turnover on target firm performance. Investigating separately the operating performance of targets and acquirers in U.K. domestic acquisitions during 2006-2014, I find that the post-acquisition peer-adjusted profits significantly improve in the unprofitable targets but do not change significantly in profitable targets. Both profitable and unprofitable targets experienced high management turnovers, but the improvement in profits does not appear to be driven by the management turnover. The reason of management turnovers is more complex than the acquisitions' market discipline function or resource-based management hypothesis. However, a complete turnover of top management in target firms seems to hurt the post-acquisition performance of acquirers, suggesting target management team may possess valuable information to facilitate the integration process. This study sheds light on the post-acquisition restructuring of target firms and their management teams, especially in private targets. Chapter 4, 'Identifying leaders among IPO firms: a content analysis of analyst coverage reports', investigates how analysts identify firms as a leader and whether leader firms go on to generate superior operating performance to non-leaders. Using a content analysis approach, I extract sentences including the keyword 'lead' from initial coverage reports and pick out sentences where the IPO firm is identified as either an 'industry leader' or 'partial leader'. I examine the textual content of initial coverage reports on U.S. IPOs during 1999-2012 and find that lead-underwriter analysts appear not to be more optimistic than non-lead-underwriters in their leadership identification of IPO firms, however, nor are they more accurate than non-lead-underwriters in identifying leader firms. I find that neither firms identified by analysts as industry leaders nor firms identified as having partial leadership advantages tend to generate superior peer-adjusted net sales or profit margins compared to non-leaders. The Global Settlement in 2003 significantly reduced the likelihood, frequency and intensity of partial leadership identification. Although there is no explicit regulation requirement on the text content in analyst reports, analysts have become more conservative in identifying a firm as a leader after the Global Settlement. This study helps investors to understand the incremental information of leadership identification in analyst reports, beyond the quantitative outputs such as stock recommendations.

Submitted by ULISSES TOSHIRO SUGAHARA null (ulissests@terra.com.br) on 2017-04-13T00:17:02Z No. of bitstreams: 1 UlissesTS_pre-textual_e_dissertacao_2017.pdf: 866084 bytes, checksum: a6c0d0e9de7f90a3ab50ac1e8b897813 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by LUIZA DE MENEZES ROMANETTO (luizamenezes@reitoria.unesp.br) on 2017-04-18T12:17:20Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 sugahara_ut_me_arafcl.pdf: 866084 bytes, checksum: a6c0d0e9de7f90a3ab50ac1e8b897813 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-04-18T12:17:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 sugahara_ut_me_arafcl.pdf: 866084 bytes, checksum: a6c0d0e9de7f90a3ab50ac1e8b897813 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-02-24 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / A presente dissertação de Mestrado insere-se no âmbito da Linha de Pesquisa Formação do Professor, Trabalho Docente e Práticas Pedagógicas do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação Escolar da UNESP (Campus Araraquara). O foco analítico principal é a produção acadêmica brasileira realizada no período de 2006 a 2016 sobre o trabalho docente no ensino superior privado no âmbito das fusões e aquisição institucionais. O contexto neoliberal provocou mudanças significativas em diferentes campos da sociedade brasileira, favorecendo alterações legais que convergiram para a expansão do ensino superior privado e para o estabelecimento de um novo modelo institucional de base empresarial, no qual o trabalho docente foi encarado como fonte de obtenção de lucros. Tal modelo se fortaleceu na última década com o surgimento de grandes grupos empresariais no ensino superior, acarretando em mudanças para os trabalhadores docentes. Para analisar tal processo, optou-se pela realização de uma investigação qualitativa que usou como procedimento de coleta de dados a revisão bibliográfica a partir das pesquisas localizadas no Banco de Teses da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), na Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Teses e Dissertações (BDTD) e nas bibliotecas virtuais de algumas universidades brasileiras. Constatou-se que as pesquisas sobre trabalho docente no ensino superior privado se constituem em objeto recente de investigação acadêmica não apenas no campo da Educação, mas também em áreas correlatas. As pesquisas apontam de um total de 2776 pesquisas localizadas, consideramos 26 trabalhos, sendo 11 teses e 15 dissertações. Destes, 06 trabalhos estavam vinculados em programas de pós-graduação de iniciativa privada e 20 trabalhos na iniciativa pública. Mais especificamente, 10 trabalhos em universidades federais e 10 em universidades estaduais. A área de Educação contribuiu com 18 pesquisas, Psicologia escolar e do Desenvolvimento Humano com 3 pesquisas, Sociologia do Trabalho com 2 pesquisas, Políticas Públicas e Formação Humana com 2 pesquisas e Administração com 1 pesquisa. No período balizado, encontramos 8 trabalhos em 2006 e 8 trabalhos em 2016, período com a maior produção de pesquisa. O referencial teórico de base marxista predominou entre as pesquisas consideradas e autores como Istávan Mészaros, Perry Anderson, Karl Marx, além de referências importantes como Ricardo Antunes, Giovanni Alves, Paul Singer, Dalila Andrade de Oliveira, Waldemar Sguissardi, Gaudêncio Frigotto e Deise Mancebo foram os mais utilizados. Na totalidade de análises das pesquisas, partiu-se da reforma neoliberal instalada à partir da década de 1990, como responsável pelas reformas educacionais. De maneira geral, para alterações significativas no trabalho docente, com evidências de precarização e intensificação, uma vez que a categoria profissional e a pesquisa acadêmica têm sido cada vez mais afetadas por práticas flexíveis de contratação no ensino superior privado. / The present Master's thesis is part of the Research Line Teacher Training, Teaching Work and Pedagogical Practices of the Graduate Program in School Education of UNESP / Araraquara Campus. The main analytical focus is the brazilian academic production carried out from 2006 to 2016 on the teaching work in private higher education in the scope of institutional mergers and acquisitions. The neoliberal context has brought about significant changes in different fields of brazilian society, favoring legal changes that have converged to the expansion of private higher education and to the establishment of a new corporate-based institutional model in which teaching work was seen as a source of Profits. This model was strengthened in the last decade with the emergence of large business groups in higher education, leading to changes for teachers. In order to analyze this process, a qualitative investigation was carried out, which used as a data collection procedure the bibliographic review based on researches located in the Thesis Bank of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), in the Digital Library Brazilian Theses and Dissertations (BDTD) and in the virtual libraries of some brazilian universities. It was found that research on teaching work in private higher education is a recent object of academic research not only in the field of Education, but also in related areas. The researches indicate a total of 2776 localized researches, we consider 26 papers, being 11 theses and 15 dissertations. Of these, 06 papers were linked in postgraduate programs of private initiative and 20 papers in the public initiative. More specifically, 10 papers at federal universities and 10 at state universities. The area of Education contributed 18 researches, School Psychology and Human Development with 3 researches, Sociology of Work with 2 researches, Public Policies and Human Education with 2 surveys and Administration with 1 research. In the period marked out, we found 8 papers in 2006 and 8 papers in 2016, the period with the highest research output. The theoretical reference of Marxist base predominated among the considered researches and authors like Istávan Mészaros, Perry Anderson, Karl Marx, besides important references like Ricardo Antunes, Giovanni Alves, Paul Singer, Dalila Andrade de Oliveira, Waldemar Sguissardi, Gaudêncio Frigotto and Deise Mancebo Were the most used. In the whole analysis of the research, it started from the neoliberal reform installed from the 1990's, as responsible for the educational reforms. In general, for significant changes in teaching work, with evidence of precariousness and intensification, since the professional category and academic research have been increasingly affected by flexible hiring practices in private higher education.

Com o crescimento da economia brasileira as operações de Fusões e Aquisições tem vivenciado um franco crescimento. Segundo trabalhos recentes sobre o tema, esse tipo de operação tem um componente estratégico muito superior ao simples ganho imediato de valor, tese que se justifica com os trabalhos empíricos atuais, que encontram fortes evidências que a empresa adquirente, frequentemente, perde valor de mercado, através da queda no preço das suas ações, nos dias seguintes à combinação empresarial. No entanto, a maioria dos trabalhos sobre o tema versam sobre operações de Fusões e Aquisições no mercado norte-americano e europeu, onde estruturas regulatórias e cultura de proteção aos acionistas minoritários divergem muito das situações encontradas no Brasil. Por outro lado, a economia brasileira após a implantação do Plano Real é relativamente recente, mas sendo permeada por crises internacionais e nacionais na década de 1990, além de um período de intenso programa de privatizações que fez surgir grandes grupos econômicos nacionais, tornando esse período um intervalo temporal único, e que as evidências encontradas nesse período possam não ter muita aderência à atual realidade brasileira. Através de um estudo de caso com 121 empresas listadas na BOVESPA, foi analisado a criação de valor para o acionista da empresa adquirente através de uma janela temporal de 20 dias antes e 20 dias após o anúncio do fato relevante que dá início a combinação empresarial. Foram utilizados dois métodos para observar a criação ou destruição de valor para o acionista, o método do retorno de mercado e o método do modelo de mercado ajustado, que demonstraram ser idênticos para a análise proposta. Analisando operações de combinação empresarial de 2001 a 2011, as empresas adquirentes foram agrupadas através da Classificação Nacional de Atividades Econômicas (CNAE) e submetidas a critérios de seleção da amostra que reduziu o grupo estudado a três setores econômicos, o da Indústria de Transformação, o de Informação e Comunicação e por fim o de Serviços Financeiros. Os resultados sugerem que os investidores tem informações sobre a operação de Fusão e Aquisição antes da divulgação do Fato Relevante pelas empresas, fazendo com que as ações experimentem altas em seus preços dias antes do anúncio, assim como foram encontradas evidências que o Setor Financeiro tem um comportamento que rejeita a hipótese de eficiência de mercado em sua forma semiforte. / In the past few years, with the growth of the Brazilian economy, operations of Mergers and Acquisitions had experienced significant growth. According to recent papers, this type of operation has a strategic component far superior to the simple gain of immediate value, a thesis justified with empirical work showing strong evidence that the acquiring company often loses market value, noticed by the falling prices of its shares in the days following the merger announcement. However, most studies on the subject deal with operations of Mergers and Acquisitions in the U.S. market and Europe, where regulatory structures and culture of protection of minority shareholders are much different from the situations we find in Brazil. On the other hand, the stability of the Brazilian economy, after the Real Plan, is relatively recent, being permeated by national and international crises in the 1990s. Through a case study with 121 companies listed on the BOVESPA, we analyzed the creation or value for shareholders of the acquiring company through a time window of 20 days before and 20 days after the announcement of the merger. Two methods were used to observe the creation or destruction of shareholder value, the method of the market return and the method of adjusted market model, which proved to be identical to the proposed analysis. Analyzing business combination transactions from 2001 to 2011, the acquiring companies were grouped by the National Classification of Economic Activities (CNAE) and subjected to a selection criteria that reduced the sample group to three economic sectors, the Manufacturing Industry, the Information and Communication and finally the Financial Services. The results suggest that investors have information about the operation of Merger and Acquisition before the announcement, causing stocks to experience increases in their prices days before the announcement, and evidence was found that the financial sector has a behavior that rejects the hypothesis of market efficiency in its semi-strong form.

The organizational change of the Swedish police force has become the victim of massive criticism due to the negative results that have continued since 2015. After the organization experienced a structural change that was something between a merger and an acquisition the operational results have continued to decline. One aspect that has been left out of the discussion has been the organizational identity change of the police. Previous research on organizational identity have been very interested in structural organizational changes and have found a vast number of results in different contexts. Identity ambiguity, who are we as an organization, have been present in many cases. Weakened legitimacy claims and changed operational activities have been noticed in many as well. This is studied with a qualitative methodology and an inductive research approach. Information from nine interviews with current and former members of the Västerås police department make up the data that is analysed. What is discovered is the emergence of frustration as an organizational characteristic. This is experienced through all levels of the organization and has resulted in superfluity and resignations.

This note proposes the continuous treatment approach as a valuable alternative to propensity score matching for evaluating economic effects of merger and acquisitions (M&As). This framework allows considering the variation in treatment intensities explicitly, and it does not call for an arbitrary definition of cutoff values in traded ownership shares to construct a binary treatment indicator. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach using data from European M&As and by relying on the example of post-M&A employment effects. The empirical exercise reveals some heterogeneities over the whole distribution of acquired ownership shares and across different types of M&As and country groups.

In the first essay, I examine stock market implications of state-to-state migration flows that are known to provide the basis for social and business networks. I observe sizeable and robust excess return comovement between migration-flow receiving and sending states at both the individual stock and the state portfolio levels. Although I find that migration flows are associated with firms’ business activities, this comovement is not fully explained by economic fundamentals and decreases substantially when firms relocate to other states. In line with the view that migration networks form the basis for a common investor base for receiving and sending states stocks, I find that a) receiving states account for a significant portion of sending states stocks’ trading volume, and b) migration comovement is strongly correlated with the percent of local population born in migration states and more prevalent in states where retail investors display “old home” bias in addition to local bias. Moreover, consistent with the view that migration comovement may be rooted in sentiment shared by a common investor base, I find that it coexists with mispricing, measured by stock return reversals. In the second essay, I test whether takeover targets are more likely to be connected to bidders via domestic migration network by relating acquisitions with the availability of social and business networks formed via interstate migration flows. I find that targets are more likely to be from the migration sending states when migration networks are sturdier. Additionally, I find that targets are more likely to be from migration sending states with stronger migration network a) when acquirer and targets are in different industries, b) when migration network involves non-neighboring states, and c) when targets are small. The results are consistent with the notion that information advantage is at least a partial explanation of firms’ propensity to choose targets from migration sending states, especially when information asymmetry about target is more pronounced. Moreover, I find that takeover premium is smaller and acquirer announcement returns are higher when migration sending states targets are small with low institutional ownership, which substantiate the view that migration networks present enhanced accessibility of soft information to acquirers and that the effect of such information advantage is valuable when there is substantial degree of information asymmetry regarding targets.

Mergers and acquisitions have become very popular in recent decades for firms seeking competitive advantage. The high failure rates of these initiatives make a closer look at the influence of the human factors and their complexity on these change activities necessary. This study traces the development of merger and acquisition activities in four companies, with a particular focus on individuals’ sensemaking over time and on the influence of human functional factors on the process and the outcomes of the mergers reviewed. A qualitative case-study approach is adopted with sixteen in-depth semistructured interviews in four post-merger organisations. The analysis of the collected primary data is done through a descriptive analysis of each individual case and a cross-case analysis of the four investigated cases. The findings show that there is a direct influence of the researched human functional elements and of the individual sensemaking on both the process and outcomes of the reviewed merger and acquisition cases. Based on the findings, a human functional merger and acquisition model – reflecting the interaction and influence of the human functional elements – and a management guideline for adopting this, are developed. This study provides a review of the influence of some significant organisational and individual human functional elements, such as leadership, communication, decision-making, relationship, and individual beliefs, values, attitudes and learning on the process and outcome of mergers and acquisitions. Such an investigation of these elements and their complexity, interaction with and influence on the process and outcome of change initiatives, and more specifically in the context of mergers and acquisitions, has not been undertaken previously.

Företagssammanslagningar kan vara en avgörande strategi för företag att växa och nå nya höjder av framgång. Men att genomföra en sammanslagning är en invecklad process som kräver noggrann planering för att lyckas. Vår undersökning syftade till att hitta nyckelfaktorerna som kan leda till en lyckad sammanslagning. Resultaten visade att det finns flera faktorer som är avgörande, inklusive en gemensam vision, ledarskap, kommunikation, förhandlingar och avtal, resurser och kundrelationer.           För att förstå dessa faktorer djupare använde vi oss av en narrativ litteraturgenomgång. Genom att undersöka ämnet från olika perspektiv kunde vi bygga en djupare förståelse av sammanslagningar. I vår empiriska undersökning använde vi kvalitativa intervjuer för att samla in data om sammanslagningar.            En av de viktigaste faktorerna som framkom var ledarskapets betydelse i att underlätta sammanslagningen genom att erbjuda stöd och resurser för att möta utmaningarna i processen. Förhandlingar och avtal är också avgörande verktyg för att skapa en överenskommelse som fungerar för båda parter. Men det är också viktigt att ha kunskap om kulturella skillnader som kan påverka samarbetet.            Resultaten av vår undersökning kan vara till hjälp för andra företag som planerar en sammanslagning, och kan även vara användbara för forskare som undersöker ämnet. Det är dock viktigt att poängtera att våra resultat är subjektiva och baserade på respondenternas åsikter om sammanslagningar. Valet av respondenter och forskningsmetod kan också påverka resultatens tillförlitlighet.             Sammanfattningsvis är framgångsrika sammanslagningar en utmaning, men genom att ha en klar vision och ledarskap, samt att bygga en öppen och samarbetsvillig kultur, kan företag nå nya höjder av framgång och lönsamhet. / Mergers and acquisitions can be a critical strategy for companies to grow and reach new heights of success. However, executing a merger is a complex process that requires careful planning to succeed. Our research aimed to identify the key factors that can lead to a successful merger. The results showed that there are several critical factors, including a shared vision, leadership, communication, negotiation and agreements, resources, and customer relationships.           To gain a deeper understanding of these factors, we used a narrative literature review. By examining the topic from various perspectives, we could build a more profound understanding of mergers. In our empirical investigation, we used qualitative interviews to collect data about mergers.           One of the most critical factors that emerged was the importance of leadership in facilitating the merger by offering support and resources to meet the challenges of the process. Negotiation and agreements are also essential tools for creating an agreement that works for both parties. However, it is also important to be aware of cultural differences that can affect collaboration.           The results of our study can be helpful for other companies planning a merger and can also be useful for researchers investigating the topic. However, it is important to note that our results are subjective and based on respondents' opinions about mergers. The choice of respondents and research method can also affect the reliability of the results.        In conclusion, successful mergers are a challenge, but by having a clear vision and leadership and building an open and collaborative culture, companies can reach new heights of success and profitability.