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Many announced cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are never brought to completion despite potential negative consequences to acquirers and targets. This paper presented evidence on the dynamic effects of spatial distance and two industry-level characteristics, namely industry relatedness between the two firms and technological intensity, on the completion likelihood of cross-border M&A deals. Based on a sample of 8,489 M&A transactions we found that the completion likelihood of cross-border M&As increases with spatial distance. The effect is more pronounced for deals across technology-based industries, evidence for related deals is inconclusive.

The authors investigate the pre-merger process, defined as the period between the announcement and completion of an M&A (mergers and acquisitions) deal. Specifically, the authors examine if the timing of the announcement in a merger wave affects whether or not the M&A deal is completed, and how long this pre-merger process takes. The authors conduct a textual analysis of the 150 largest abandoned M&A deals in the sample. From this, the authors find that competing bidders, regulatory concerns, and shareholder opposition from the acquirer are major roadblocks in the pre-merger process, and that these hurdles often occur jointly. Subsequently, the authors examine a sample of 2,802 announced M&As across four industry waves and find that M&A deals initiated earlier in a merger wave are more likely to be completed and are completed more speedily.

This study investigates the effect of national champion strategies on the length of the pre-M&A process in Europe. The policy strategy of creating so-called “national champions,” that is, promoting national rather than international mergers, is often the focus of European policy debate. If European governments support national champion M&A activities, we would expect that national champion M&A deals have an accelerated pre-M&A process at the European Commission (EU) relative to comparable European M&A deals. To empirically test this proposition, we compare national champion M&A under scrutiny by the EU to similar deals in terms of industry and firm characteristics in the period 1997–2010. In contrast to our expectation, national champion M&As face a longer pre-M&A process than other comparable European M&As. However, evidence indicates that national champion M&As are almost always completed successfully while comparable European M&As are often derailed in process.