Stock Performance of Firms Acquiring Listed and Unlisted Lodging Assets

Examining a large sample of acquisitions involving both listed (publicly traded) and unlisted (privately held firms or subsidiaries) lodging assets, this article reports that acquirers earn significant positive abnormal returns in both cases. However, these positive abnormal returns are primarily realized in deals involving unlisted targets. This remains true even after controlling for many deal and firm characteristics. Within the subset of acquisitions of unlisted targets, acquirer abnormal returns are significantly higher when relative size is greater, when at least some stock is tendered for the acquisition, and when the acquirer has not been active in acquisition in prior years. Keywords lodging mergers and acquisitions, abnormal acquisition returns, publicly traded lodging firms, privately held lodging firms Over the past three decades, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have constituted an important corporate growth strategy. Mergers and acquisitions in the lodging industry, particularly, increased dramatically between 1980 and 2009 in both number and size of deals (e.g., Canina, Kim, and Ma 2010, Exhibit 2). Given the popularity of M&A as a corpo