Effect of firm financial characteristics on potential merger and acquisition：Evidence from manufacturing industry in the UK

Merger and acquisitions (M&A) are important business activities in economic markets. The purpose of this article is to study the predictability of merger and acquisitions activities among manufacturing firms in the UK through developing a binary logit regression model for predicting takeover targets. Sample data is collected from FAME and obtain regression results from STATA. Six hypotheses are identified in the article: profitability, liquidity, leverage, efficiency, firm size and listed/unlisted status. Especially, explanatory variables in the model are firm-specific financial characteristics and use financial ratios as proxies. There are two benefits of utilizing financial ratios as proxies. First, investors have available information from financial reports. Second, financial ratios are under control of companies. In the end, out-of-sample test is developed to evaluate the predictive power of the model. This article mainly help investors and firms identify potential targets and take the corresponding action, which has significance in economic markets