Shareholder gains for bidder firms: an event study on the U.S. petroleum industry 

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the merger gains to the bidder firms’ shareholders in the U.S. petroleum industry, through an event study, and through a cross‐sectional regression on the event study results. This paper utilizes three different event windows of 3, 11 and 21 days, symmetric around the event date in the event study.

I find that the acquirers experience significantly positive abnormal returns around the announcement of the acquisition or merger. Further, I find that firms acquiring public targets experience significantly lower abnormal returns than firms acquiring private targets.

The above‐mentioned results do not seem to be driven by extreme observations, they are robust to the specification of the beta coefficients and they seem to hold even for unclustered data.