IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/acctfi/v53y2013i1p185-215.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Market risk exposure of merger arbitrage in Australia

Author

Listed:
  • Jason Hall
  • Matthew Pinnuck
  • Matthew Thorne

Abstract

type="main" xml:lang="en"> We investigate the risk-return characteristics of merger arbitrage in the Australian market for corporate control, whereby hedge fund managers acquire companies subject to a takeover offer. On average, a strategy of buying target companies and short-selling bidders making scrip offers would have generated an annual return of 30 per cent from 1985 to 2008, excluding transaction costs, compared to the return on the broader market of 12 per cent. However, performance is not market neutral, being positively associated with market returns during downturns and inversely related to market movements during rising markets. The payoffs to this strategy are analogous to a short straddle, whereby the investor is short a call and put option at the same exercise price. These results are consistent with large-sample evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom and have not previously been documented in Australia, in which prior evidence is based only on cash deals during the 1990s.

Suggested Citation

  • Jason Hall & Matthew Pinnuck & Matthew Thorne, 2013. "Market risk exposure of merger arbitrage in Australia," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 53(1), pages 185-215, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:acctfi:v:53:y:2013:i:1:p:185-215
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1467-629X.2011.00453.x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mark Mitchell & Todd Pulvino, 2001. "Characteristics of Risk and Return in Risk Arbitrage," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(6), pages 2135-2175, December.
    2. Schwert, G. William, 1996. "Markup pricing in mergers and acquisitions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 153-192, June.
    3. Samuelson, William & Rosenthal, Leonard, 1986. "Price Movements as Indicators of Tender Offer Success," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(2), pages 481-499, June.
    4. White, Halbert, 1980. "A Heteroskedasticity-Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimator and a Direct Test for Heteroskedasticity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(4), pages 817-838, May.
    5. Fama, Eugene F. & French, Kenneth R., 1993. "Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 3-56, February.
    6. Francesca Cornelli & David D. Li, 2002. "Risk Arbitrage in Takeovers," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 15(3), pages 837-868.
    7. Hutson, Elaine, 2000. "Takeover targets and the probability of bid success: Evidence from the Australian market," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 45-65, February.
    8. Giammarino, Ronald M & Heinkel, Robert L, 1986. "A Model of Dynamic Takeover Behavior," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(2), pages 465-480, June.
    9. Hsieh, Jim & Walkling, Ralph A., 2005. "Determinants and implications of arbitrage holdings in acquisitions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(3), pages 605-648, September.
    10. Jindra, Jan & Walkling, Ralph A., 2004. "Speculation spreads and the market pricing of proposed acquisitions," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 495-526, September.
    11. Carhart, Mark M, 1997. "On Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(1), pages 57-82, March.
    12. Krishnan Maheswaran & Soon Chin Yeoh, 2005. "The Profitability of Merger Arbitrage: Some Australian Evidence," Australian Journal of Management, Australian School of Business, vol. 30(1), pages 111-126, June.
    13. Baker, Malcolm & Savasoglu, Serkan, 2002. "Limited arbitrage in mergers and acquisitions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(1), pages 91-115, April.
    14. Larcker, David F. & Lys, Thomas, 1987. "An empirical analysis of the incentives to engage in costly information acquisition : The case of risk arbitrage," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 111-126, March.
    15. Branch, Ben & Yang, Taewon, 2006. "A test of risk arbitrage profitability," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 15(1), pages 39-56.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Faff, Robert & Prasadh, Shyaam & Shams, Syed, 2019. "Merger and acquisition research in the Asia-Pacific region: A review of the evidence and future directions," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 267-278.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Andrey Golubov & Dimitris Petmezas & Nickolaos G. Travlos, 2013. "Empirical mergers and acquisitions research: a review of methods, evidence and managerial implications," Chapters, in: Adrian R. Bell & Chris Brooks & Marcel Prokopczuk (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Empirical Finance, chapter 12, pages 287-313, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    2. Ian McDermott & Mark Mulcahy, 2017. "Merger Arbitrage in Germany," Journal of Finance and Investment Analysis, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 6(2), pages 1-2.
    3. Buehlmaier, Matthias M. M. & Zechner, Josef, 2016. "Financial media, price discovery, and merger arbitrage," CFS Working Paper Series 551, Center for Financial Studies (CFS).
    4. Andriy Bodnaruk & Massimo Massa & Andrei Simonov, 2009. "Investment Banks as Insiders and the Market for Corporate Control," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(12), pages 4989-5026, December.
    5. Eliezer Fich & Viktoriya Lantushenko & Clemens Sialm, 2019. "Institutional Trading Around M&A Announcements," NBER Working Papers 25814, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Hsieh, Jim & Walkling, Ralph A., 2005. "Determinants and implications of arbitrage holdings in acquisitions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(3), pages 605-648, September.
    7. Dai, Rui & Massoud, Nadia & Nandy, Debarshi K. & Saunders, Anthony, 2017. "Hedge funds in M&A deals: Is there exploitation of insider information?," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 23-45.
    8. Arouri, Mohamed & Gomes, Mathieu & Pukthuanthong, Kuntara, 2019. "Corporate social responsibility and M&A uncertainty," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 176-198.
    9. Peter Van Tassel, 2016. "Merger options and risk arbitrage," Staff Reports 761, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    10. Antonio Roma, 2022. "Is the value effect due to M&A deals? Evidence from the Italian stock market," Economic Notes, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, vol. 51(1), February.
    11. Officer, Micah S., 2007. "Are performance based arbitrage effects detectable? Evidence from merger arbitrage," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 13(5), pages 793-812, December.
    12. Anthony Ravi & Peter Mayall & John Simpson, 2012. "Takeover Probabilities and the Opportunities for Hedge Funds and Hedge Fund Replication to Produce Abnormal Gains," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Greg N. Gregoriou & Maher Kooli (ed.), Hedge Fund Replication, chapter 4, pages 48-60, Palgrave Macmillan.
    13. Jindra, Jan & Walkling, Ralph A., 2004. "Speculation spreads and the market pricing of proposed acquisitions," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 495-526, September.
    14. Stefan Eichler & Dominik Maltritz, 2013. "An options-based approach to forecast competing bids: evidence for Canadian takeover battles," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(34), pages 4805-4819, December.
    15. Geczy, Christopher C. & Musto, David K. & Reed, Adam V., 2002. "Stocks are special too: an analysis of the equity lending market," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(2-3), pages 241-269.
    16. Ferguson, Colin & Finn, Frank & Hall, Jason & Pinnuck, Matt, 2010. "Speculation and e-commerce: The long and the short of IT," International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 79-104.
    17. Bali, Turan G. & Brown, Stephen J. & Caglayan, Mustafa Onur, 2011. "Do hedge funds' exposures to risk factors predict their future returns?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 101(1), pages 36-68, July.
    18. David A. Volkman, 1999. "Market Volatility And Perverse Timing Performance Of Mutual Fund Managers," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 22(4), pages 449-470, December.
    19. Jung‐Soon Shin & Minki Kim & Dongjun Oh & Tong Suk Kim, 2019. "Do hedge funds time market tail risk? Evidence from option‐implied tail risk," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 39(2), pages 205-237, February.
    20. Agarwal, Vikas & Fung, William H. & Loon, Yee Cheng & Naik, Narayan Y., 2004. "Risk and return in convertible arbitrage: Evidence from the convertible bond market," CFR Working Papers 04-03, University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:acctfi:v:53:y:2013:i:1:p:185-215. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaanzea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.