| M&A is an important means for companies to realize capital expansion,break the bottleneck of development and optimize internal strategies.Chinese M&A market is developing with an unprecedented speed,which provides strong driving force for industrial upgrading,structural adjustment and enterprise transformation.Due to the performance of M&A is restricted by many factors,the differences of M&A motivation,M&A scale and others of different companies will have different impact on the companies’ future development.At the same time,the development and integration of M&A activities need financial support from the company,it will involve multiple interests.Therefore,different merger and acquisition characteristics will bring different degrees of risk to the market.The bond market has become an important channel for companies to obtain funds.With the growth of the bond market,the protection of creditors’ interests has attracted more and more attention.At present,most domestic researches focus on the influence of M&A announcement on stock market,and there are some controversies about the influence of M&A on bond market at home and abroad.Some scholars believe that M&A can improve the operating performance of the company from the perspective of synergistic effect,thus M&A can help company to increase the wealth of bondholders.Some scholars have also proved that,from the perspective of arrogance theory and agency theory,M&A will increase the operating risks of enterprises and cause losses to bondholders.So what impact will the announcement of M&A have on the bond market in the domestic market? Whether the characteristics of mergers and acquisitions will also have an impact on the bond market?Therefore,this paper focuses on the above problems.In this paper,the domestic A-share listed companies with M&A activities from2014 to 2020 are selected as the research objects.We combine the existing relevant theories and empirical studies at home and abroad to make research hypotheses.Then we make use of companies’ corporate bond transaction data and M&A transaction data,and conduct empirical analysis through event study method and regression model.Firstly,we preliminarily verifying whether M&A announcements will cause reactions in the bond market in the short term,this paper also examines the relationship between the relative scale of M&A and abnormal credit spreads.And we conducted the robustness test by changing the window period of the event study,changing the individual fixed effects model and reducing the sample size.Secondly,we further analyze the heterogeneity between M&A activity and bond market according to different corporate characteristics,M&A types,internal control quality,external supervision and information disclosure quality,bond credit rating.The results show that: First,bond spreads widen significantly in the two months following a merger announcement,and bond markets react negatively to M&A events.Second,M&A scale is significantly positively correlated with abnormal bond spreads.The larger the M&A scale,the more prominent the negative reaction of the bond market will be.Third,in the process of merger and acquisition,the nature of the enterprise,the type of merger and acquisition,the level of internal control,the level of external supervision and information disclosure,and the bond credit rating will all have different effects on the negative reaction of the bond market.At present,the global economy is generally sluggish and the international economic situation is becoming more uncertain.How to standardize the M&A behavior to make the economy develop steadily,reduce the market risk,and create a good financing environment for enterprises is an urgent problem for us to solve.Therefore,based on the empirical results,this paper puts forward several specific suggestions as follows.First,before M&A,enterprises should build a reasonable valuation model to evaluate and price the target of M&A.Second,before making a decision,the enterprise should match its own situation with the overall situation of the target and grasp whether the overall difficulty of M&A transaction is acceptable.Third,enterprises should strengthen their internal control and external supervision quality.Enterprises should pay attention to the work of creating a good internal environment and consciously strengthen the external supervision,so as to reduce the degree of information asymmetry between them and the public.Fourth,the relevant government departments should strengthen the supervision,review and punishment in the process of mergers and acquisitions.At the same time,the government should also make standard requirements for the content of the merger announcement.Fifth,the company should pay more attention to and protect the interests of creditors,stipulate remedial measures after losses in advance.At the same time,the company should also set up relevant mechanisms to protect creditors in the process of merger and acquisition to enhance the enforceability of creditor protection. |
