Background: Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are two types of corporate takeover strategy, that is widely used for strengthening and maintaining a firm competitive advantage in both domestic and global markets. Where the common motives behind M&A, is to achieve business expansion through synergy, or to acquire an existing external technology/product outside of a firm's own operational territory. As the world has entered an era of information and globalization, where innovation seems to prosper and different industry markets have become ever more integrated on a global scale, not least in the software industry. Hence, more firms have resorted to M&A in order to survive in a modern competitive market. For example, to capture more market shares, boost productivity, cut development costs, improve investment returns, etc. Nevertheless, the integration process of M&A carries lots of risks, where there is lots of different factors that needs to be considered and discussed before adopting M&A strategies. Such as, what industry are the involving firm operating in, which country are the involving firm located in, and what economic impacts can be triggered by M&A announcements. However, there are currently lack of literatures investigating the economic impacts of M&A announcements across different industries. That is, depending on if the firms are operating within or outside of the same industry, the economic impacts of the M&A announcement might differ. Objectives: The objective of this thesis is to analyze the market reactions generated from M&A announcements, and determine if the economic impacts will be greater if a software target firm is merged/acquired by a software or non-software acquiring firm. Methods: A quantitative statistical event study has been used as the main methodology in this thesis. Which is a standard method to analyze market reaction, that is in this case represented by financial stock market data. Following the event study, a multiple regression analysis was conducted in order to explain the event study, by examine the economic impact on the abnormal return derived from M&A announcements. Results: The result from the event study disclosed that target firms tends to experience more positive abnormal returns, while acquiring firms will experience negative abnormal returns during M&A announcements. The results of the multiple regression analysis, revealed various significant variables that has high explanatory power to the abnormal return. Conclusions: Based on the empirical results, the greatest economic impact could be identified during an M&A announcement that involves a cooperative partnerships deals between software target firms and non-software acquiring firms. Furthermore, acquiring firms tends to offer a higher premium to target firms during M&A transactions. This in turn indicates that acquiring firms will statistically receive less abnormal returns compared to target firms. Delimitations: Due to the wide-ranging scope of an event study that has many diverse adoptions areas to explore, the author decided to make some demarcations in this thesis. In particular, this thesis will be focusing on analyzing stock price movements prior and during M&A announcements. In addition, certain factors/variables that can potentially generate a significant economic impact during M&A announcements will be investigated. Hence, other aspects that are related or may affect M&A transactions itself, will scarcely be discussed or even excluded from this study.

To improve our understanding of offshoring and how it is evolving, salient ideas from both institutional and prospect theories are utilized to build a more descriptive model of how decisions are made to (re)direct foreign investment into offshored activities. Careful examinations of the offshoring programs in India and Mexico reveal that they took different investment trajectories during the past decade that can be aptly explained by this integrative model. The primary information used to measure the population trends of offshoring firms in India and Mexico comes from proprietary data sources for each country that issue annual reports on the number of operators in their respective offshoring sectors, that is, services and manufacturing.

To improve our understanding of offshoring and how it is evolving, salient ideas from both institutional and prospect theories are utilized to build a more descriptive model of how decisions are made to (re)direct foreign investment into offshored activities. Careful examinations of the offshoring programs in India and Mexico reveal that they took different investment trajectories during the past decade that can be aptly explained by this integrative model. The primary information used to measure the population trends of offshoring firms in India and Mexico comes from proprietary data sources for each country that issue annual reports on the number of operators in their respective offshoring sectors, that is, services and manufacturing.

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The impact that economic crises have on firms is profound. Such events affect the extent to which firms invest in innovation. This exploratory study aims to investigate to what extentfirms emphasize exploratory and exploitative innovation as a result of economic crises. The study further aims to examine the presence of a rigid or risk-seeking response, in terms of innovation, as a result of the crisis. Through analysis of the contents of the CEOs’ letters to theshareholders, I captured the firms’ emphasis on exploratory and exploitative innovation in a sample of 14 large Swedish firms, three years before and after the crisis and examined the presence of a rigid or risk-seeking response, by comparing both periods. The findings indicate a short-term rigid response as well as no indication of a risk-seeking response. The study contributes to the body of knowledge about how economic crises impact the firms’ emphasis on investing in innovation, a field lacking a consensus among authors.

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