Analysis of the impact of mergers and acquisitions on the financial performance and market power of the U.S. forest products industry

The U.S. forest products industry has witnessed an unprecedented period of mergers and acquisitions in the last decades. The first part of this thesis evaluated the impact of the mergers on the financial performance of the U.S. forest products industry by event study. The results revealed that the equity market reacted positively to these mergers; the position of a firm and the relative transaction size explained most of the variations of the cumulative abnormal returns; and the risk for most of the selected 14 acquiring firms had changed after the mergers. The second part examined the market power of the U.S. paper industry by the new empirical industrial organization approach. The results indicated that the oligopoly power remained significant at the 1% level over the whole sample period; whereas the oligopsony power had dropped dramatically and become insignificant at the 5% level in recent 30 years.;Key words. Capital Asset Pricing Model, event study, NEIO, risk, state space, time-varying parameters.