Are cross-border Mergers and Acquisitions more successful between culturally similar countries in the EU?

Master's Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - General, grade: 7.00, Maastricht University (Finance), course: International Business, language: English, abstract: Cross-border mergers and acquisitions have increased significantly over the last two decades and have substantially changed the European industry, since it has become one of the leading approaches for firms to gain access to global markets. However, there has been little progress in the research literature investigating the role of culture in explaining the success of these cross-border transactions. This paper analyzes if cross-border M&As are more valuable for acquirers between culturally similar countries by investigating the countries’ cultural distance, legal origin, trust, Hofstede’s dimensions, and corporate governance measures. The results indicate that cultural distance has a positive and negative effect on bidder announcement returns. Legal origin has a negative effect on acquirer gains in cross-border M&A whereas trust has a positive but insignificant effect. Hofstede’s dimensions have no particular effect on the data set and corporate governance measures have a strong negative effect on bidder announcement returns. The robustness checks do not alter the results.