Do Acquiring Firms’ Board Characteristics Influence Their M&A Performance?

M&A has always been a hot topic on the capital market. In recent years, the ministries issued frequently to optimize mergers and acquisitions market environment. Especially, the State Council proposed the guidance of further optimizing mergers and acquisitions market environment, and established the basic principles of respecting the dominant position of enterprises and the role of market mechanisms and improving the government’s management and services on Mar 7,2014. Companies will become more independent in mergers and acquisitions decision-making, and avoid being "arbitrarily arranged". An open, orderly, usher M & A market is worth expecting. Board of directors as an important internal mechanisms of modern corporate governance are both supervisor and participants in all important decisions in the company, the research of the effectiveness of the Board from the perspective of M&A also has a unique advantage.Based on the perspective of ownership type and corporate governance, an empirical research is done in this paper to give an analysis of the relationship between board characteristics and M&A performance of the acquiring firms, taking 1389 samples of the Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies implementing M & A from 2004 to 2013.In this empirical research, it’s indicated that duality and M&A performance are in significant negative correlation in private listed companies. Independent directors failed to function as expected in M & A activity. Independent directors and M&A performance are significantly positively related. This positive effect is better reflected in private listed companies than in state-owned companies. Board shareholdings and M&A performance had a remarkable positive correlation in the state-owned listed companies to private listed companies. Women-executive directors can play a positive role in M & A activities.The Board should provide constructive suggestions for the merger decision and play a supervisory role for the acquisition strategy. Although the factors affecting the company’s M&A performance are complex, continuous improvement of board governance is still important to ensure mergers and acquisitions of listed companies creating value. Designing an effective mechanism to simultaneously play a supervisory and incentive role to ease the principal-agent problem is still an important challenge in the field of modern corporate governance. To further improve the efficiency of board governance of listed companies, we can on the one hand rely on the appropriate board leadership structure and organizational structure arrangements; on the other hand we can further implement effective incentive and restraint mechanisms and improve the degree of gender diversity on the board of directors.Compared with existing research, innovations of this article may be:(1) This paper studies the role of women involved in mergers and acquisitions which little domestic research examined. (2) The variables are more detailed definited, making the research more rigorous and meaningful.