Mergers are notorious for producing bad returns for investors. Another example of this has emerged today with Hewlett-Packard writing off $5bn in its latest accounts from its 2011 merger with Autonomy, a British technology and software company. HP are claiming accounting irregularities (fraud), which meant that it overvalued the company. Autonomy's founder, however, is claiming that HP simply destroyed value after the merger! You can read BBC and Guardian coverage here and here.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne...