Does market misvaluation drive post-acquisition underperformance in stock deals?

There is limited direct evidence on the impact of market misvaluation on acquirer long run performance. In this paper, we hypothesize that stock prices of stock-financed acquirers would move toward their fundamental value in the long run, thus correcting the initial overvaluation. Empirical results show that more overvalued acquirers are associated with poorer post-acquisition abnormal returns. We eliminate the concern that our findings are due to either overpayment or overvaluation-driven bad acquisitions. Our results are robust to controlling for market-wide valuation, alternative methods and assumptions used to calculate abnormal returns and fundamental value, and other factors affecting acquirer returns.