Mergers and Acquisitions

Understanding the Relevance of Sustainability in Mergers and Acquisitions—A Systematic Literature Review on Sustainability and Its Implications throughout Deal Stages

“…From a terminology perspective, transactions must be distinguished between mergers and acquisitions. Mergers represent transactions that form a new company with the combination of two entities, while acquisitions are understood as a takeover of another firm, which is named as a target, by an acquirer party [23,32,52].…”

“…Several driving forces behind merger activities have been identified and theoretically underpinned [32]. Theories, on the one hand, argue from a macroeconomic perspective and define the merger as a consequence of economic disturbances.…”

“…On the other hand, theories based on firm-specific motivations have been developed [32]. Those theories are mostly based on the perspective of the bidder's shareholder gains.…”

“…The contribution of sustainability to the long-term value of the company, also exceeding the year of the deal (e.g., up to three years after the merger), is measured in the long-term financial deal performance. Studies base their analysis on market-or accounting-based metrics and shed light on the question of whether sustainability performance matters for value creation [31,32].…”

“…The final success of M&A deals can be judged in the post-deal phase using performance measures [31]. Studies are paying more attention to analyzing whether sustainability is relevant to better post-deal performance or whether sustainability performance can be influenced by M&A [22,32]. However, non-existing integrative design can also be considered with respect to the intersection of sustainability and M&A research.…”