Bad Corporate Marriages: Waking Up in Bed the Morning After

January 17, 2014 Leave a comment

Bad Corporate Marriages: Waking Up in Bed the Morning After

Ye Cai Santa Clara University – Leavey School of Business

Hersh Shefrin Santa Clara University – Leavey School of Business; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

December 27, 2013

Abstract: 
This paper examines corporate risk taking behavior in the wake of unsuccessful merger activities. We find that relative to other firms, firms that made bad acquisitions take both more systematic risk and more idiosyncratic risk. Moreover, higher risk is associated with greater value destruction and stronger corporate governance. The increased risk can be traced to increased cash flow volatility, increased leverage, decreased asset liquidity, more investment in R&D, and more equity-based executive compensation. These findings are in line with the behavioral approach suggesting that in the domain of losses, decision makers generally become more tolerant of risk.

Filed under Research

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: