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The purpose of this paper is to study how institutional characteristics of specified purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are related to their post-merger survival. SPACs are unique financial firms that conduct the initial public offering (IPO) with the sole purpose of using the proceeds to acquire another private company. The paper finds that institutional characteristics of SPACs are important in determining post-merger outcomes of new company, specifically when it comes to their survival/failure, i.e., increases in pre-merger commitment by SPAC stakeholders and initial positive market performance increase post-merger survival likelihood; on the contrary, mergers with higher transaction costs and focused on foreign companies exhibit increased likelihood of failure.

Using unique sample of companies conducting an IPO, namely, SPACs, with the sole purpose to execute an acquisition in the future date within limited time, this paper presents additional evidence on the survival and acquisition frequency of IPOs, and determinants of these choices.

Observing unique set of specified purpose companies, this paper documents that SPACs’ failure rate is at the level of 58.09 percent, higher than any previously reported failure rate in the post-IPO survival literature and comparable only to failure rates found by Hensler et al. (1997) at 55.10 percent for general companies. In addition, the paper documents similar findings to Bhabra and Pettway (2003) that prospectus and market characteristics of original companies have predictive power with respect to survival.

This study extends the literature on post-IPO survival in following ways. First, the paper documents survival rates for unique set of companies organized with the sole purpose to acquire another company. Second, the paper presents evidence on how institutional characteristics of SPAC determine their post-merged outcomes, specifically when it comes to their failures. Finally, paper contributes to the scant literature on SPACs providing new evidence on their post-merger outcomes and performance.

This paper aims to study characteristics of specified purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and examine the performance of their securities over time.

Previous findings in literature on SPACs' performance around the announcement of merger date are scarce, not uniform, and mostly address the performance of SPACs' common shares. The authors believe that more insights on merger announcements can be obtained if the perf]ormance of all three types of securities that SPACs issue during the IPO, namely units, common stocks, and warrants are analyzed simultaneously. In order to examine the behavior of these securities we form three samples with daily returns for three distinguished SPAC securities. Results are obtained for abnormal returns based on the market model from Brown and Warner.

It is found that SPACs represent a fairly unique way to raise capital. The incentives of their founders, underwriters, and investors are interdependent and successful business combinations generally result in significant returns to founders. The analysis shows that SPACs have a complex corporate structure in which the incentives of the founders, underwriters, and investors are interdependent and where successful mergers result in significant returns to the founders. It also shows that different SPAC securities do not exhibit similar reactions in response to announcements regarding their corporate status. While holders of all three securities realize positive abnormal returns on the merger announcement day, the strongest reaction is observed among the investors holding warrants, while common stock holders react very mildly.

SPACs are recent phenomena in capital markets and very few papers in finance literature describe them. None of the existing papers evaluated performance of all three types of SPAC securities: units, common shares and warrants before this paper.