RECENT TRENDS IN THE STUDY OF MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

Mergers and acquisitions are important operations that happen nowadays. The goal of such processes is to “conquer” new markets and benefi t from their resources (natural or human), or to lower competition (by acquiring a competitor or merging with it). More and more studies are written on this subject, thing that makes people interested in it have a diffi cult job in staying up to date. That is why the present research had as a goal to evaluate and summarize the latest trends in the study of this subject. Based on our goal we have conducted an extended analysis on the studies published in 2014 in this field. Additionally, we have also descriptively analyzed the period 2010–2014. For this, we have presumed that the most important research is to be found in the ISIThomson Web of Knowledge. We point out the lack on such literature on the developing countries, as most of these studies are related to the developed ones, such as the USA, the UK, China or Germany. The major part of them is published in the Journal of Corporate Finance. The second part of the article comes to emphasize the most important ideas that are to be found in the 2014 field’s literature. Many of the studies are related to the banking sector. Additionally, we found new indexes created to evaluate the M&A performance or the concentration degree of the market due to and after M&A operations. There are papers that assess different theories, such as the merger waves theory, the concentration-fragility hypothesis, the too-big-to-merge, too-big-to-succeed or, too-big-to-fail theories and so on.