盈餘操控對購併公司股價長期表現之影響

Abstract

Previous studies have documented that the acquiring firms in mergers significantly underperform those in tender offers after acquisitions. Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain the poor post-acquisition stock performance of mergers: the method of payment (cash vs. stock) and book-to-market effect (value vs. growth firms). This paper attempts to explore an alternative hypothesis, earnings management, to account for the long-run performance after the acquisition. We argue that bidders in stock-financed mergers have incentives to boost up pre-merger earnings and this manipulation behavior causes the subsequent poor performance. We find that stock mergers do have aggressive levels of earnings management than cash mergers, and these high manipulated earnings are significantly and negatively related to the abnormal returns of stock mergers. However, there is no relationship between the degree of earnings management and long-run performance of cash mergers. Moreover, book-to-market ratios cannot explain the long-run abnormal returns of acquisitions when manipulated earnings are controlled. All these results suggest that the poor performance of stock mergers is mainly due to earnings manipulations, rather than the book-to-market effect or payment method.