Takeovers and Divergence of Investor Opinion

Abstract

We test several hypotheses on how takeover premium is related to investors’ divergence of opinion on the target’s equity value. We show that the total takeover premium, the pre-announcement target stock price runup and the post-announcement stock price markup are all higher when investors have higher divergence of opinion. Identical results obtain with higher market-level investor sentiment. When divergence of opinion is higher, a firm is less likely to be a takeover target, although takeover synergy in successful takeovers is higher. Our results suggest that takeovers may play a role in explaining high contemporaneous stock prices in the presence of high divergence of investor opinion.