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This paper aims to investigate the causes of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals that acquiring firms pay excess premium beyond the market-expected level and examine the relation between the announcement return and long-term performance of the acquiring firms.

Based on a sample of 1,767 US firms’ M&A deals from 2000 to 2014, the authors use the expectation model used by Ang and Ismail (2015) to measure normal offer premium in an M&A deal. They conduct the standard event study methodology to observe the market reaction for acquiring companies on the announcement day. Buy-and-hold abnormal returns are used for the main explanatory variable so as to find the impact of the premium paid on the long-term performance of the acquirer.

First, acquiring firms are faced with negative market returns when acquiring firms pay excess premiums. Second, poor long-term performance of the acquiring firms is observed if acquiring firms pay excess premium. Finally, the negative relation between excess premium and acquiring firms’ long-term performance weakens, as the sample period becomes longer.

The hypotheses and results of the empirical study are as follows. First, the acquirer’s market reaction on the announcement day is negative when it pays an excess offer premium. This is because the market perceives the premium to be greater than the value of the deal, which damages the value of the market, as it is not perceived as a proxy for future synergy. Second, the acquirer’s long-term performance is low when it pays the excess offer premium. It is the same result as the acquirer’s market reaction on the announcement day. This shows that the excess premium does not result in either a short-term positive reaction or a long-term profit for the acquiring shareholders. However, it is found that the relationship between the excess premium and the long-term performance of the acquirer decreases with time. This is because the long-term performance of the acquirer is more affected by management and other events after the deal.

The authors divide the total premium paid into the normal offer premium and the excess premium, and their focus is on the excess premium part. The main contribution of this paper is that it analyzes how the excess premium affects the market reaction on the announcement day and the long-term performance of acquiring firms.