"During the last fifteen years, the European banking industry has experienced considerable consolidation through mergers and acquisitions against the background of the introduction of the single currency and reductions in cross-border barriers. This paper investigates whether these changes impacted on announcement period gains of the banks acquiring targets by examining the pre-euro, run-up to the euro and post euro eras. Evidence suggests bidders' gains have fallen with the development of economic and monetary union. It also reveals significant differences in the gains from acquisitions within and outside the eurozone. These results are consistent with increased competition among bidders and increased integration of the market in the eurozone area in the post-euro era. However, differing results relating to focused and diversifying bids suggest that the level of market integration is sector dependent." Copyright (c) 2007 The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Relaxed disclosure requirements of unlisted firms, as compared to publicly listed companies, lead to limited quality and quantity of information at bid announcements, causing difficulty in valuing gains from mergers. This raises the question: are the frequently reported superior announcement-period gains to unlisted-target acquirers sustainable in the long run? Our results for the UK show that unlisted-target acquirers gain on announcement, but suffer a substantial loss in the long run. This reversal in fortune of unlisted-target acquirers is in sharp contrast to the performance of listed-target acquirers in the UK. Therefore, short-run gains for unlisted-target acquirers may result from investors' excessive optimism when faced with limited and biased information. Copyright (c) 2009 The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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We study how value creation in vertical acquisitions varies in the importance of the target's assets to its acquirer. The synergistic gain increases in the degree of vertical relatedness between the acquirer and target industries. This finding suggests that the importance of the target firm's assets to its acquirer's productivity is an important value-creating channel in vertical acquisitions. We also find evidence suggesting that acquirers extract greater value as the synergistic gain increases, consistent with an efficient investment incentive underlying the integration decision.