Activity: Talks or Presentations › Other Invited Talks or Presentations
Description
This study presents evidence that the incentive of acquiring data assets is an important driver behind mergers and acquisitions (M&As) decisions of firms. We use staggered adoption of Data Breach Notification Laws across U.S. states to capture this incentive. Using 23,931 state-industry-year observations for the period 1998-2018, we find that the enforcement of the laws spurs overall M&As activities in the adopting states-as measured by total deal number and total deal volume. We predict that this effect is more pronounced in industries where data assets are rich and strategically important, which would confirm that acquiring data assets is indeed an underlying channel for M&As.