Ownership structure and stock market performance of acquiring firms: The case of French mergers

Abstract

This study examines the short- and long-term relationship between the shareholder structure (family, institutional, managerial ownership) and stock market performance of acquiring firms. To explore this issue, we use a sample of 84 acquisitions undertaken by French firms operating in the real estate and financial sectors over the period 2008-2012. To compute short-term stock performance we used the standard event study methodology while we estimated the CAR and BHAR to study long horizon up to 36 months. The results show a curvilinear relationship between the manager’s ownership and stock market performance. We provide evidence that increasing managerial ownership up to 16% has a negative impact on a firm performance after which it becomes positive. Moreover, the separation between ownership and control does not seem to affect the performance of initiators firms due to a lack of significance of the coefficients suggesting the absence of expropriation of minority shareholders. Finally, examining the links between the shareholding nature and performance shows that family and institutional shareholders have a positive influence on performance. Our research tried to fill the gap in the existing literature by studying concurrently the impact of ownership structure variables on the short as on the long post-merger performance.