Success of Mergers and Acquisitions in the Insurance Industry

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 1,3, University of Cologne (Seminar fr Allg. BWL, Risikomanagement und Versicherungslehre), language: English, abstract: Since the 20th century, the insurance industry has experienced an unprecedented wave of M&A. However, in spite of the drastic increase in insurance M&A activity, there has been little consistent empirical evidence on the value enhancement of these deals. Hence, many open questions still exist in this research area. The most fundamental questions are whether insurance M&A actually create value and what determinants influence the success of these undertakings. This thesis attempts to find answers to these questions by first examining the status quo of academic literature published in this field of research and bringing together the empirical findings on the success of insurance M&A and its influencing factors. Overall, the literature review outlines that insurance M&A on average tend to create value for shareholders of the target firms as well as for the combined entity of acquirer and target. Moreover, shareholders of acquiring US insurance firms, on average, also benefit from these corporate undertakings. However, negative short-term as well as long-term wealth effects for acquiring insurers' shareholders are the common finding in capital market studies analyzing the effects of M&A transactions in the European insurance industry. Secondly, the reliability and validity of the findings of previous research are tested in an own empirical analysis which uses a fairly new approach to evaluating the success of M&A by using the idea of stochastic dominance (SD). More precisely, using a sample of 102 transactions conducted by publicly traded Western European insurance firms between the years 1993 and 2009, this work analyzes whether investors in acquiring insurance firms benefit from M&A by comparing return distrib