Intra-industry’ Effects from Mergers on Financial Statements, in and out of Technology-intensive Industries: Evidence from Greece

Abstract

The study examines the impact of mergers on accounting performance of Greek listed firms involved in mergers. More specifically, we studied a sample of thirty-two absorbed listed firms in four sectors (primary sector, technology-intensive industrial sector, commercial and services sector, construction sector) during the period of economic crisis by using thirtytwo accounting measures and ratios extracted from corresponding financial statements. The results of the study indicated that there is no statistically significant improvement or worsening for none of the examined variables in the post-merger period for the merged firms in the four examined sectors. However, as the whole economic image of the Greek economy is not very encouraging with the economic crisis, we concluded that mergers lead the involved firms to avoid any business losses in such a difficult economic period. Last, the results among four industries showed that none of the examined quantitative variables has a statistically significant change, and thus, did not reveal a different performance of one industry, as economic crisis had horizontal effects all over the Greek business.