Comparing global airline merger experiences from a financial valuation perspective: an empirical study of recent european based airline mergers

During the past decade, the European airline industry has started a series of consolidations. Although the topics of airlines' mergers and acquisitions have been discussed in several aspects, the issue of how their stock prices and trading volumes respond to merger announcements has not been well documented. This paper intends to fill this gap by examining how investors reacted to merger announcements. Empirical results indicate that the dependencies between stock returns and trading volumes were positive and investors were in favor of the firms who made the announcements.