Maximising Firm Value through Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions, literally, are centred on the objective to create economic value for firms and shareholders. Different mergers and acquisitions strategies would affect the extent of shareholder value. This study seeks to examine the value implications of mergers and acquisitions by studying shareholder value creation for a 60 Malaysian firms which have been actively involved in the cross-border and domestic diversifications during the period 1996 – 2004.Our focus in this study is to compare the value effects of two broad types of mergers and acquisitions, which are cross-border and domestic mergers. The study entails several statistical tests, including Levene’s, Pearson and multiple regressions, to assess the extent of value creation of cross-border and domestic mergers. We find strong evidence that firms with cross-border mergers increase shareholder value measured by ROE. This result is proved to stay in parallel with the theoretical framework that suggested in the finance literature. By contrast, we find that firms with pure domestic mergers have no positive effect on ROE but our results indicate that some productivity results are yielded which means mergers and acquisitions enable domestic firms to improve their operational efficiency, to a certain extent. Further, arguments are presented to analyse the reasons why cross-border firms are able to outperform slightly than the domestic firms on average. Consistent with the prior research and past literature, our results show generally R2 of 50% - 60% are found on cross-border firms across all sets of financial and operational independent variables. Comparatively, although firms with pure domestic mergers show higher R2 on operational variables, overall results is biased. Negative earnings result is associated significantly with the ROE. By integrating these results, we noted that cross-border firms are performed better with a stable and persistent pattern of earnings performance if compares to the biased and unstable results which are found on domestic firms

Global standards of Constitutional law : epistemology and methodology

Just as it led the philosophy of science to gravitate around scientific practice, the abandonment of all foundationalist aspirations has already begun making political philosophy into an attentive observer of the new ways in which constitutional law is practiced. Yet paradoxically, lawyers and legal scholars are not those who understand this the most clearly. Beyond analyzing the jurisprudence that has emerged from the expansion of constitutional justice, and taking into account the development of international and regional law, the ongoing globalization of constitutional law requires comparing the constitutional laws of individual nations. Following Waldron, the product of this new legal science can be considered as ius gentium. This legal science is not as well established as one might like to think. But it can be developed on the grounds of the practice that consists in ascertaining standards. As abstract types of best “practices” (and especially norms) of constitutional law from around the world, these are only a source of law in a substantive, not a formal, sense. They thus belong to what I should like to call a “second order legal positivity.” In this article I will undertake, both at a methodological and an epistemological level, the development of a model for ascertaining global standards of constitutional law

Maximising Firm Value through Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions, literally, are centred on the objective to create economic value for firms and shareholders. Different mergers and acquisitions strategies would affect the extent of shareholder value. This study seeks to examine the value implications of mergers and acquisitions by studying shareholder value creation for a 60 Malaysian firms which have been actively involved in the cross-border and domestic diversifications during the period 1996 – 2004.Our focus in this study is to compare the value effects of two broad types of mergers and acquisitions, which are cross-border and domestic mergers. The study entails several statistical tests, including Levene’s, Pearson and multiple regressions, to assess the extent of value creation of cross-border and domestic mergers. We find strong evidence that firms with cross-border mergers increase shareholder value measured by ROE. This result is proved to stay in parallel with the theoretical framework that suggested in the finance literature. By contrast, we find that firms with pure domestic mergers have no positive effect on ROE but our results indicate that some productivity results are yielded which means mergers and acquisitions enable domestic firms to improve their operational efficiency, to a certain extent. Further, arguments are presented to analyse the reasons why cross-border firms are able to outperform slightly than the domestic firms on average. Consistent with the prior research and past literature, our results show generally R2 of 50% - 60% are found on cross-border firms across all sets of financial and operational independent variables. Comparatively, although firms with pure domestic mergers show higher R2 on operational variables, overall results is biased. Negative earnings result is associated significantly with the ROE. By integrating these results, we noted that cross-border firms are performed better with a stable and persistent pattern of earnings performance if compares to the biased and unstable results which are found on domestic firms