The Effect of Cultural Similarity on Mergers and Acquisitions: Evidence from Corporate Social Responsibility

By Frederick Bereskin, Seong K. Byun, Micah S. Officer, Jong-Min Oh. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2018

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the effect of corporate cultural similarity on merger decisions and outcomes. Using the similarity in firms’ corporate social responsibility characteristics to proxy for cultural similarity, we find that culturally similar firms are more likely to merge. Moreover, these mergers are associated with greater synergies, superior long-run operating performance, and fewer write-offs of goodwill. Our evidence is consistent with the notion that cultural similarity eases post-deal integration. Our results contribute to the literature on the determinants of merger success, provide new evidence on the impact of corporate culture, and offer a new approach to defining firms’ cultural similarity.

Subfields: Accounting, Social Psychology, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fded5a3b7bac6ca95ce3fb98e99c2e562e5b9b8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. W. Rotenberg
2. Frederick Bereskin
3. Po-Hsuan Hsu

In Strategy and Management

1. W. Rotenberg
2. Frederick Bereskin
3. Po-Hsuan Hsu

Citations in the corpus

• The Real Effects of Real Earnings Management: Evidence from Innovation (2018, methodology): “25 This method has been used in Feldman et al. (2014), DeFond et al. (2016), Balsmeier et al. (2017), and Bereskin et al. (2017).”
• Why is Corporate Virtue in the Eye of The Beholder? The Case of ESG Ratings (2021, unknown): “7 that uses ESG data to understand their relationship with other important organizational and market outcomes (Khan, Serafeim, and Yoon 2016; Ferrell, Liang, and Renneboog 2016; Bereskin et al. 2018).”