But What Will It Do For My EPS? An Unflattering But Powerful Motive for Mergers

There is widespread evidence that bidders are more highly valued than their targets, and that both parties tend to be in temporarily high-valued industries. We find that valuation differences are also extremely important in predicting who will be acquired and when. Our evidence also suggests that the driving force is more a desire to increase earnings per share the ( the bootstrap game ” in the classic text of Brealey, Myers, and Allen’s (2007)) than to exploit market mis-valuation. We find that a firm is more likely to be a target when others in the industry could acquire them in a stock-swap merger that appears accretive to the buyer while paying the target a substantial premium. The resulting measure is similar to the dispersion of valuation multiples within an industry, but is grounded in a specific model of managerial behavior and is empirically much stronger than dispersion. Indeed, it is stronger than any measure in the existing literature, including recent industry merger activity