Renneboog and Vansteenkiste survey the market for corporate control with a specific discipline: they ask where short-run announcement returns do and do not predict long-run performance, and which determinants survive across the wide variety of measures the field uses. Their compilation lands on a short list of factors with real predictive weight, including serial acquisition behavior, CEO overconfidence, the relatedness and complementarity of acquirer and target, and shareholder oversight, while candidly cataloguing how much of the variation remains unexplained.
The Institute’s reading: two of their surviving determinants are directly actionable by a private buyer. Relatedness and complementarity is thesis discipline wearing academic clothes: deals near what the buyer understands outperform adventures. And overconfidence is the only determinant on the list a buyer can fix in the mirror, which is precisely what this site’s Readiness Diagnostic and the walk-away disciplines from Mastering the Merger exist to institutionalize.