Mergers, Acquisitions, and Corporate Restructurings, 7th Edition

Preface

The field of mergers and acquisitions has undergone tumultuous changes over the past four decades. The fourth merger wave of the 1980s featured a fascinating period of many hostile deals and leveraged buyouts along with many more “plain vanilla” deals. The 1990s witnessed the fifth merger wave—a merger wave that was truly international in scope. After a brief recessionary lull, the merger frenzy began once again and global megamergers began to fill the corporate landscape. This was derailed by the subprime crisis and the Great Recession. When the economic recovery was initially slow, so too was the rebound in M&A activity. However, by 2013 and 2014, M&A volume rebounded strongly and has continued in the years that followed.

Over the past quarter of a century, we have noticed that merger waves have become more frequent. The time periods between waves also has shrunken. When these trends are combined with the fact that M&A has rapidly spread across the modern world, we see that the field is increasingly becoming an ever more important part of the worlds of corporate finance and corporate strategy.

As the field has evolved we see that many of the methods that applied to deals of prior years are still relevant, but new techniques and rules are also in effect. These new methods and techniques consider the mistakes of prior periods along with the current economic and financial conditions. Participants in M&As tend to be an optimistic lot and often focus on the upside of ...