"Attività M&A Durante l'Ultimo Decennio negli Stati Uniti d'America: Analisi dei Fattori che Impattano la Creazione di Valore per le Acquisizioni di Aziende Private"

The following research wishes to assess the main drivers of economic value creation in accordance with the latest trends in the M&A industry. Well-established companies are always more relying on external acquisitions in order to handle the challenges brought by the continuously changing economic environment. The research proposed by the paper, only consider acquisitions involving privately held companies. This, in the attempt of including in the targets' sample, start-ups and young innovative companies. In fact, these entities represent one of the main characteristics of the last decade's M&A activity. In order to assess whether or not these acquisitions are considered to deliver value to the acquiring company's shareholders, the study has revolved around the analysis of the Cumulative Abnormal Return variable which has been set as the main dependent variable. The research will assess the relation of the main dependent variables with fundamental figures reported on companies' financial documents and also with other derived variables. In particular, the research will attempt to find whether the dependent variable is related to the level of Research and Development expenditures of the acquiring company. Furthermore, the CAR variable will be related to whether or not acquirer and target company are considered to belong to the same industry. Other variables would be deployed throughout the regression studies functioning as control variables and the variations on relations and their level of significance will be assessed. The key finding proposed by the following paper is the existence of a negative and statistically significant relation between the economic value creation at the announcement date of the transaction and the level of R&D expenditures reported by the acquiring company. With further implementations, this paper aims to be considered as a starting point for future researches which will try to define the drivers and key characteristics of acquisitions including start-ups and other young innovative entities.