Center of Excellence in Management Research for Corporate Governance and Behavioral Finance, SASIN School of Management, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
NIDA Business School, National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA), Bangkok, Thailand.
PLoS One. 2022 Jan 28;17(1):e0260688. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260688. eCollection 2022.
Exploiting a novel measure of takeover vulnerability mainly based on state legislations, we explore the effect of hostile takeover threats on credit ratings. Our results reveal that companies with more takeover exposure are assigned significantly better credit ratings. In particular, a rise in takeover vulnerability by one standard deviation results in an improvement in credit ratings by 7.89%. Our findings are consistent with the view that the disciplinary mechanism associated with the takeover market mitigates agency problems and ultimately raises firm value. Further analysis corroborates our conclusion, including propensity score matching, entropy balancing, and an instrumental-variable analysis. As our proxy for takeover susceptibility is plausibly exogenous, our results are more likely to show a causal effect.
利用一项主要基于州立法的新型接管脆弱性衡量指标，我们探讨了敌意收购威胁对信用评级的影响。研究结果表明，面临更多接管风险的公司获得的信用评级显著更高。具体而言，接管脆弱性上升一个标准差会导致信用评级提高 7.89%。我们的发现与以下观点一致，即与收购市场相关的约束机制可以减轻代理问题，并最终提高公司价值。进一步的分析支持了我们的结论，包括倾向得分匹配、熵平衡和工具变量分析。由于我们的接管风险代理变量很可能是外生的，因此我们的结果更有可能显示出因果效应。
