Lu (2015)

Lu, Weijie. “Corporate Cultural Spillover and Synergistic Gains: Evidence from Mergers and Acquisitions.” Asian Finance Association (AsianFA) 2015 Conference Paper, July 2015.

From the author’s abstract: “Recent research has documented that firms’ social performances have huge impacts on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) outcomes. Using a large sample of U.S public firm data, I test several theories of whether and how the cultural differences measured by adjusted corporate social responsibility (CSR) scores of the acquirer and the target affect short- and long-term post-M&A performances. Consistent with the stakeholder value maximization view, I find that a firm’s shareholders react positively to the deals that involve high CSR acquirers buying targets with low CSR scores and targets without CSR ratings… The paper also finds that deals with CSR-rated acquirers realize higher M&A announcement returns compared to the deals with non-rated acquirers, suggesting that CSR ratings produce valuable information to financial market.”

Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2565052