Nº 20-102: Management Practices and M&A Success

This paper studies whether management quality in acquiring firms determines merger and acquisition (M&A) success. We model management practices as an unobserved (latent) variable in a standard microeconomic model of the firm and derive firm-year management estimates. We show that our measure is among the most important determinants of value creation in M&A deals. Our results are robust to the inclusion of acquirer fixed effects, to a large set of control variables, and to several other sensitivity tests. We also show that management explains, albeit to a lesser extent, acquirers’ return on equity and Tobin’s q.