“…Following the merger literature, we control for firm characteristics and deal variables that have power in explaining acquirer abnormal returns. Therefore, we include in equation (4) the age of the acquirer to control for information asymmetry (Barbopoulos et al , 2012; Moeller et al , 2007), the return on assets to control for acquirer profitability (Andriosopoulos and Yang, 2015; Benson et al , 2015; Louis, 2005; Yen and André, 2019), the ratio of total debt to total assets to control for acquirer leverage (Ge et al , 2020; Hirsch and Walz, 2019; Zhang and Mauck, 2018), the beta coefficient to control for acquirer risk (Bozos et al , 2013; Brealey et al , 2019), the current ratio (ratio of current assets to current liabilities) to control for acquirer liquidity (Hu et al , 2020), the ratio of fixed assets to common equity to control for tangibility (Ang et al , 2019; Hu et al , 2020) and Tobin’s q ratio to control for acquirer’s growth opportunities (Dong et al , 2006; Elnahas and Kim, 2017; Servaes, 1991). Furthermore, we include in equation (4) variables related to the merger deal, which are the deal value (Alexandridis et al , 2013) and the relative deal size (Alexandridis et al , 2017; Humphery-Jenner and Powell, 2014; Moeller et al , 2004).…”