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Acquiring-firm shareholders lost 12 cents around acquisition announcements per dollar spent on acquisitions for a total loss of $240 billion from 1998 through 2001, whereas they lost $7 billion in all of the 1980s, or 1.6 cents per dollar spent. The 1998 to 2001 aggregate dollar loss of acquiring-firm shareholders is so large because of a small number of acquisitions with negative synergy gains by firms with extremely high valuations. Without these acquisitions, the wealth of acquiring-firm shareholders would have increased. Firms that make these acquisitions with large dollar losses perform poorly afterward.IN THIS PAPER, WE EXAMINE THE EXPERIENCE of acquiring-firm shareholders in the recent merger wave and compare it to their experience in the merger wave of the 1980s. Such an investigation is important because the recent merger wave is the largest by far in American history. It is associated with higher stock valuations, greater use of equity as a form of payment for transactions, and more takeover defenses in place than the merger wave of the 1980s.1 Though these differences suggest poorer returns for acquiring-firm shareholders, there are also several reasons why the acquiring-firm shareholders may have better returns. With the growth of options as a form of managerial compensation in the 1990s, managerial wealth is more closely tied to stock prices, presumably making management more conscious of the impact of acquisitions on the stock

Acquiring-firm shareholders lost 12 cents at the announcement of acquisitions for every dollar spent on acquisitions for a total loss of $240 billion from 1998 through 2001, whereas they lost $7 billion in all of the 1980s, or 1.6 cents per dollar spent. Though the announcement losses to acquiring-firm shareholders in the 1980s are more than offset by gains to acquired-firm shareholders, the losses of

We examine the theoretical predictions that link acquirer returns to diversity of opinion and information asymmetry. Theory suggests that acquirer abnormal returns should be negatively related to information asymmetry and diversity-of-opinion proxies for equity offers but not cash offers. We find that this is the case and that, more strikingly, there is no difference in abnormal returns between cash offers for public firms, equity offers for public firms, and equity offers for private firms after controlling for one of these proxies, idiosyncratic volatility. (JEL G31, G32, G34) This article examines whether variables suggested by diversity-of-opinion models and information asymmetry models are helpful in understanding the cross-sectional variation in acquirer announcement returns using a sample of pure equity offers and pure cash offers for public and private firms from 1980 to 2002. We document that these variables, the uncertainty proxies, explain a significant fraction of the cross-sectional variation in acquirer announcement returns. Perhaps most strikingly, after controlling for the uncertainty proxies, there is no difference in abnormal returns between cash offers for public firms, equity offers for public firms, and equity offers for private firms. Using two proxies for diversity of opinion employed previously in the literature, the standard deviation of analyst forecasts and breadth of ownership, we show that bidder abnormal returns for acquisitions of

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