The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation » Patterns in Corporate Events

While the market efficiency debate continues (that it is really a degree of market efficiency not an either or discussion is often forgotten), it seems more and more that the independence of investment and financing decisions has been scuttled.

From Private equity firms to corporations it seems that there are definite hot cold financing times and that these influence activities from takeovers to investments and buybacks etc. The following is from Rau and Stouraitis

The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation » Patterns in Corporate Events:

"Our analysis focuses on the timing of five different types of corporate events (new issues – both IPOs and SEOs, mergers – both stock and cash-financed, and share repurchases) using a comprehensive dataset of corporate transactions over the 25-year period 1980-2004.

The starting point in our analysis is the observation that most corporate events are combinations of two activities that have been central to corporate finance: financing decisions and investment decisions. The academic literature has traditionally argued that financing and investment decisions are driven by one of two hypotheses: (1) The neoclassical efficiency hypothesis which suggests that managers undertake corporate transactions for efficiency reasons, issuing equity or buying targets to take advantage of growth opportunities or to invest in positive NPV projects, and (2) the market misvaluation hypothesis which suggests that rational managers take advantage of irrational market misvaluations by issuing stock in exchange for cash or other firms.

...Our analysis suggests that waves are driven by both neoclassical and misvaluation factors and the relative importance of these factors changes in different periods,"