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I am looking for sources of available datasets on M&A. My preference would be for a clean panel dataset that might have previously been used for the purpose of studying the effect of M&A on either firm profits, or their R&D activity. I know that this is rather specific, but any broader suggestions on good sources for M&A data would also be appreciated.

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  • Two thoughts -- (1) does DUNS track this sort of thing; (2) would public companies have to notify the SEC? A quick search of the SEC's documentation for EDGAR suggests that you're likely interested in documents DEFM14A and DEFM14C, but it's possible that someone's already reduced those to extract what you're looking for.
    – Joe
    Aug 13, 2014 at 15:56
  • Thanks Joe, yes EDGAR is a great resource for this purpose but would require a lot of work to put together. If I was looking to do new research on the effect of mergers that would be fine, but my objective is to try out some statistical methods and would therefore prefer to play around with a complete and clean dataset (if one is out there). Thanks!
    – Seb
    Aug 13, 2014 at 16:40
  • Have you found papers that were written based on the kind of data you seek? Have you asked any of the authors for the data? Aug 19, 2014 at 22:03
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    I have assembled a clean database on tech acquisitions by: Adobe, AOL, Apple, BlackBerry, CA Technologies, Cisco Systems, eBay, Facebook, Google, HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Sony, Symantec, Twitter, Yahoo It includes almost 1700 deals and transactions, sourced from CrunchBase. I'm using it for a project that I'll publish soon, at most next week - the data will be released under CC-BY SA 4.0 If you can't wait that long & this is something you're interested in, I can show you the dataset you privately before the publishing date!
    – user3646
    Sep 22, 2014 at 12:35
  • Please post as soon as it's released. Before that the post is useless. Sep 22, 2014 at 15:08

2 Answers 2

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The effects of mergers: an international comparison (Gugler, Mueller, Yurtoglu, Zulehner) indicates that its "principal source of data" is the Global Mergers and Acquisitions database of Thompson (sic) Financial Securities Data (TFSD). Their "data description" (section 4) doesn't describe substantial follow-on work.

Starting from that reference, it appears that the Thomson database is the most highly regarded. (See "Sources for M&A Information" from the University of Chicago library. U of C library also refers to MergerMarket, which has free league table "data" (in PDF form) from 2011 on their site. The PDFs are computer generated, so would probably lend themselves to data extraction with a tool like Tabula.

Other papers I found described their methodology as something which sounded more labor-intensive, but perhaps if you contact authors, you might get more information about what they did and if they'll share it.

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A competition at http://algomost.com/en/tasks/predict-acquisition contains the data on 2500 companies over 21 years and their M&A deals.

Also, http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2059.pdf:

There are three basic sources of time-series data on mergers and acquisitions for the postwar period: the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the periodical Mergers & Acquisitions, and the annual reports of W.T. Grimm & Co.

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