ABSTRACT
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) remain an essential strategy for corporate development, enabling many firms to cope with changing environments, markets, and technologies (Bauer and Matzler, 2014; Swaminathan et al., 2008; Weber and Drori, 2011). For example, in 2010 General Electric announced a plan to invest about US$30 billion over the next three years on acquisitions in order to cope with market developments. Like GE, other global players as well as medium-sized firms have spent billions of dollars on non-organic growth strategies (Jansen, 2008). This overall importance of M&A is demonstrated by the annual global transaction value that approximates the GDPs of large economies, such as Germany’s (e.g. GDP of Germany was US$3.8 billion in 2014; transaction volume in 2014 was US$3.6 billion). Even though the market for M&A is strongly cyclical – usually following global economic development – the overall importance of M&A is still increasing and we are currently entering a new boom period (Düsterhoff, 2015). One significant change since the M&A peak in 2000 is that a major part of M&A activity was among small-and medium-sized firms. After the economic downturn in 2007 and the subsequent downturn in the M&A market, M&A activity is now increasing again and cross-border deals are becoming increasingly important (Shimizu et al., 2004).
