Ming Gu, Dongxu Li, Xiaoran Ni: Too much to learn? The (un)intended consequences of RegTech development on mergers and acquisitions-厦门大学金融系

Ming Gu, Dongxu Li, Xiaoran Ni: Too much to learn? The (un)intended consequences of RegTech development on mergers and acquisitions

发表期刊:Journal of Corporate Finance

发表时间:Available online: 31 August 2022

作者及单位:Ming Gu, Dongxu Li *, Xiaoran Ni *

Department of Finance, School of Economics & Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics (WISE), Xiamen University, Fujian 361005, China

摘要:Regulatory and technological (RegTech) developments have been changing the nature of financial markets in recent decades. This paper documents the real effects of RegTech in the market of corporate control. Exploiting the staggered implementation of the EDGAR system from 1993 to 1996 as quasi-exogenous RegTech shocks, we find that RegTech developments reduce firm acquisitiveness, especially for growth firms, solo-bidder deals, and stock-based acquisitions. Our main findings still hold when employing the stack-cohort approach to address concerns regarding biased staggered DiD estimators. In addition, EDGAR implementation discourages informed trading and lowers the acquirers’ announcement returns. Overall, our deal-level analyses show how RegTech development matters for firm investment decisions with more granularities. Our paper differs from but complements recent empirical evidence that EDGAR implementation increases the level of overall investment, suggesting that dampened managerial learning induces firms to switch from highly risky and uncertain projects (M&As) to routine projects with less uncertainty (capital expenditures).

关键词:Regulation technology (RegTech); EDGAR; Mergers and acquisitions (M&As); Firm acquisitiveness; Price efficiency