During mergers and acquisitions, the CEOs of the acquiring firms are likely to cancel the deal if the market does not react favorably to its announcement. Using a sample of French acquisition announcements during the period from 2000 to 2005, this paper studies the conditions in which CEOs are more willing to listen to investors. Furthermore, according to the strong networks developed through French elite schools' alumni and board ties, the well-connected CEOs are more likely to complete any deal in spite of a negative market reaction to acquisition announcements.

This paper proposes a method to compute ex-ante trading costs at the intraday level from limit order books. Using nearly 500 of the largest traded companies in the NYSE ArcaBook, we show that these costs have nontrivial intraday dynamics, are negatively related to volume and positively related to volatility. When ex-ante trading costs are incorporated into price impact specifications, the results show that this measure provides relevant information about price changes of the market at a high frequency level. Our evidence suggest that ex-ante trading costs constitute a new source of information for the study of intraday liquidity.