DR. ETTORE CROCI
We document that coordination among institutional investors affect how firms behave in the takeover market. We use geographic distance between the largest firms’ institutional investors as proxy for the ease of communication, cooperation and coordination among institutional investors. Consistent with the view that geographic proximity allows investors to facilitate more deals, firms with geographically close institutional shareholders are more likely to acquire other companies. We also show that M&As carried out firms for which institutional investors are geographically close, tend to generate higher abnormal returns around their announcement. Overall, these findings indicate that coordination among investors not only increases takeover activity, but also it improves its quality. We provide further support by showing that when corporate governance quality of the acquiring firm is low, or when its information cost is high, geographic closeness between main institutional owners plays a more important role
