Mergers and innovation in big pharma

The aims of this paper are to study the effects of mergers on the R&D activity of consolidated firms and to explore the relationship between ex-ante relatedness of merging parties and their ex-post performances. The analysis is conducted using data of the pharmaceutical industry for the period 1988-2004. The empirical results suggest that merged companies have on average, worse performances than the group of non-merging firms. This result is confirmed when I account for the endogeneous formation of mergers by selecting a control group first using the propensity score method and then taking into account the technological relatedness of the firms. Finally, I find that higher levels of technological relatedness are not associated with better R&D outcomes.