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Journal of Banking & Finance Vol. 35 No. 9 2011

Bank M&A: A market power story?

Yassin Hankir1; Christian Rauch2; Marc P. Umber3

1 McKinsey & Company (Germany) · 2 Goethe University Frankfurt · 3 Frankfurt School of Finance & Management

Abstract

This paper analyzes capital market reactions to international bank M&A. We investigate the combined stock return patterns of targets, bidders, and their peers upon takeover announcement, and closing or withdrawal. We distinguish five common M&A hypotheses and relate characteristic and mutually exclusive abnormal stock return patterns to each hypothesis. The findings show that there are more investors who believe in gains through the exploitation of market power by the post-merger entity than investors who believe in any of the other motives tested in the paper. In a multinomial logistic model we show that patterns related to market power significantly concur with large relative target size, intra-industry mergers, and increasing market concentration, suggesting a substantial lessening of competition through M&A.

DOI
10.1016/j.jbankfin.2011.01.030
Volume
35
Issue
9
Pages
2341-2354
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref openalex

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