Detecting informed trading prior to hospitality acquisitions

Hospitality acquisition payment announcements provide a particularly interesting opportunity for exploring the effects of information asymmetry on informed trading activities in hospitality firms. The empirical results in this paper, derived from a market microstructure approach, support the presence of informed trading in the short term prior to a hospitality acquisition. For cash- or stock-financed acquisitions, while we detect no change in the bid–ask spread of acquiring firms prior to an acquisition announcement, the ask or bid depths narrow prior to an acquisition payment announcement. For mixed-financed acquisitions, the bid–ask spread for acquiring firms widens and the ask depth narrows prior to the acquisition payment announcement.