Post acquisition performance in the Italian food & beverage sector: do the characteristics of the acquirer matter?

The purpose of this thesis is to study the evolution of the post-acquisition performance of companies operating in the Italian food & beverage sector. Starting from an overview of the sector where its principal features are described (i.e., perspectives, attractiveness), passing through the presentation of the different acquirers (i.e., strategic and financial, domestic and foreign) and through the theoretical explanation of the already extant literature about the M&As’ impact on targets, we end up studying the effects of acquisitions on the base of a database we constructed. The acquisitions performed from January 2015 to December 2018 with acquired firms active in the Italian food & beverage sector are our focus. We construct two samples of companies: one of acquired firms (treated group) and one of not acquired firms (control group). In particular, we want to analyze the post-acquisition effects of different acquirers on the acquired company performance. Applying the propensity score matching method (PSM), we first get insights on the effects of acquisition versus non-acquisition, then we move to the effects of domestic and foreign acquisition versus non-acquisition, and we close with the analysis of the effects of strategic and financial acquisition versus non-acquisition. Final part of the thesis is composed by a complementary analysis on impact of target's characteristics, to which study’s results, limitations, and managerial implications follow.