During the recent decade, the world has witnessed the rapid growth of MNEs from emerging economies. Their increasing participation in cross-border mergers and acquisitions has raised great attention in the extant literature. This study evaluates the value creation from these cross-border transactions from two representative emerging countries, namely China and India, and determines factors that result in the different performance of these international acquisition activities. Crossborder acquisitions conducted by these countries' companies indeed lead to significant shareholder wealth creation. Furthermore, Indian shareholders are more likely to benefit from deals in small cultural distance countries, while Chinese investors gain from the cross-border expansion of manufacturing companies. Location also affects the performance of cross-border acquisitions, with acquisitions into developed countries generating higher returns to shareholders. Our sample consists of 203 Indian and 63 Chinese cross-border deals over the period 2000-2010 and our results hold after controlling for various deal-level and firm-level characteristics.

This article deals with the time-series variation in average sin stock returns-returns on publicly-traded companies involved in producing tobacco, alcohol, and gaming. Next to nothing has been written about this class of stocks, especially on the European stock market. The hypothesis I explore in this paper is that sin stock returns depend on legal and cultural characteristics such as religious preferences, the level of excise taxation, and the degree of litigation risk. Using data on 18 European countries over the period 1975-2006, my results show evidence that Protestants are more "sin averse" than Catholics, and require a significant premium on sin stocks. Moreover, sin stocks have higher risk-adjusted returns when they are located in a country with high excise taxation; and sin stocks outperform other stocks when the litigation risk is higher, even after controlling for well-known risk factors such as market capitalization and book-to-market ratio. These findings suggest that sin stock returns depend on both legal and religious environments of each country.

The study looks at mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in ASEAN countries and examines the post-M&A performance using data from 2001 to 2012. The industry-adjusted operating performance tends to decline in the 3 years following an M&A. Yet, the results suggest that M&As completed during the financial crisis are more profitable than those implemented before and/or after the crisis. We argue that this is mainly due to the synergies created between the firms' resources during the crisis which augur well for firms' economic performance. We find that, during the crisis, certain characteristics of the firms like the relative size of the target, cross-border nature of deals, acquirer's cash reserves and friendly nature of deals are important determinants of long-term post-M&A operating performance.However, for M&As during the crisis, there appears to be no relationship between performance and firms' characteristics linked to M&A activity such as payment method, industry relatedness and percentage of target's share acquired.

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Drawing on social identity and social impact theory, this paper is the first to investigate the impact of religious preferences on share prices and expected returns at the country level. Using data from 12 European countries, our findings suggest that religion has a significant effect on the share price of companies whose activities are considered unethical, i.e., tobacco manufacturers and alcohol producers. The share price of these companies (called sin stocks) is depressed when they are located in a predominantly Protestant environment (relative to a Catholic environment). With investors in Protestant countries being more sin averse than in Catholic countries, they insist upon higher expected returns on sin stocks. Conversely, religious preferences do not have the same impact on the performance of other companies, e.g. socially responsible companies. Our results are robust to various methodologies and controlling for several firm-specific, industry-specific and country-specific characteristics.