Description
International acquisitions trigger significant changes to the acquiring company's capital structure. It is valuable for managers of a multinational enterprise (MNE) to have at their disposal a model that determines the optimal financing structure for corporate expansion already when making the respective investment decision. Intense discussion in the finance and international business (IB) literature has clarified the firm-specific characteristics that determine the degrees to which acquisitions are financed with debt or equity. Research has also pointed out the importance of national characteristics for capital structure, but not linked it to international acquisitions. Consequently, this paper develops and empirically tests a framework integrating firm-specific and regulatory institutional distance variables that models the financing decision. Institutional, pecking-order and trade-off theories are accommodated in the development of the model. Hierarchical linear analysis is conducted on secondary data describing a multi-home and multi-host country sample of 874 cross-border acquisitions in the 2000s. Underinvestment problems, diversification, operational risk and institutional distance are found to affect the acquiring company's debt-equity choice. The integration of financial and IB theory explains how country-level characteristics affect the optimal financing of international acquisitions and puts a comprehensive model for the financial side of strategic acquisition planning at managers' disposal.| Period | 23 Jun 2014 → 26 Jun 2014 |
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| Event title | AIB |
| Event type | Unknown |
| Degree of Recognition | International |