The sample of M&As is collected from the Securities Data Corporation’s (SDC) US Mergers and Acquisitions Database. We select both completed and withdrawn domestic M&As with announcement dates between 1980 and 2003, and require both the acquirer and the target to be public firms. We include only acquisitions in which the acquiring firms control less than 50% of the shares of the target firms before acquisition announcements. We further require that 1) deal values are at least $10 million; 2) acquiring firms are listed on the NYSE, AMEX, or NASDAQ when the acquisitions are announced; 3) stock price and return information of acquiring firms are available fromCenter.
