Introduction

Corporate mergers and acquisitions, or M&A, and corporate consolidation have, for nearly half a century, been one of the areas of greatest concern to economists and policy-makers. At the beginning, scholars of industrial economics made their fundamental explorations on the issues. George Joseph Stigler and Oliver Williamson have been leading scholars exploring the effects of M&A from the aspects of corporate consolidation performance and public welfares. But as the welfare effects of M&A are complicated in theory and non-convergent in conclusion, many empirical studies have been conducted on the effects of M&A performances. And these explorations mostly resort to event studies and accounting information. As for the social effects of M&A, discussions are mostly carried out following diverse M&A models (Barros 1998; Yoshio Kamijo and Yasuhiko Nakamura 2009), M&A types (Julia et al. 1996), and the impacts of M&A policies (Khemani and Shapiro 1993, with remarkable research results achieved. In response to the waves of M&A in China, studies on M&A theory and empirical studies on M&A have flourished, making the field a thriving branch of research. Many scholars, focusing on the aspect of enterprises, study the mechanism and micro effects of corporate consolidation using event studies and accounting information. And from the aspects of M&A and industrial market structure, helpful explorations have been made by Gao Feng et al. (2001), Fan Conglai et al. (2002), Liu Yu (2008), and Wen Haitao (2010).