Annual comprehensive look at M&A activity by Deloitte about deal trends and common challenges faced by corporations and private equity firms.
Organization
Truth and Bias in M&A Target Fairness Valuations: Appraising the Appraisals
by Matthew Shaffer, Harvard Business School.
In U.S. M&A transactions, target directors are effectively required to seek and consider a “fairness opinion” and supporting valuations before accepting a takeover offer. Despite their legal status, critics have argued that these valuations are biased and sometimes low-quality, and that even unbiased valuations would not be useful to public companies, which can use their pre-deal stock price as an appraisal of their value.
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Cost of Capital Study 2018 (New Business Models – Risks and Rewards)
by KPMG. The thirteenth edition of the study includes 276 companies.
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Murray Devine Valuation Advisors Publishes Q3 Private Equity Valuations Report
The Q3 report, “This Train Keeps Rolling,” breaks down private equity activity in 2018 between deal size and sector. While valuations remain near historic highs, multiples have come down slightly in all but the small-market. Still, debt markets and considerable sums of dry powder available to private equity investors have allowed sponsors to pay a considerable premium over strategic acquirers as of the end of Q3.
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Company Valuation Specialists’ Interactions with Management and Auditors: A Field Study
by Kyrre Kjellevold, Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), Department of Accounting, Auditing and Law
Management often relies on specialists for valuing complex fair value measurements (FVMs), auditors frequently rely on those FVMs as audit evidence, and the PCAOB has documented persistent problems in the audit of FVMs. Based on in-depth interviews of Norwegian audit partners and company valuation specialists, I provide evidence on how audit teams interact with company specialists, how company specialists view the work of auditors and auditor specialists, and the extent of pressure company specialists’ experience to conform to management measurement bias.
