In the paper, Financing-Motivated Acquisitions, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we evaluate the extent to which acquisitions lower financial constraints on a sample of 5,187 European acquisitions occurring between 2001 and 2008. Each of these targets remains a subsidiary of its new parent, so we can observe the target’s financial policies following the acquisition. We examine whether these post-acquisition financial policies reflect improved access to capital.
Managers often justify acquisitions with the logic that they can add value to targets by facilitating the target’s ability to invest efficiently. In addition to the operational synergies emphasized by the academic literature, financial synergies potentially come from the ability to use the acquirer’s assets to help finance the target’s investments more efficiently. However, examining this view empirically is difficult, since for most acquisitions, one cannot observe data on target firms on subsequent to being acquired. Because of disclosure requirements in European countries, we are able to construct a sample of European acquisitions containing financial data on target firms both before and after the acquisitions. We use this sample to test the hypothesis that financial synergies are one factor that motivates acquisitions.
