Merger and acquisition tend to be an appreciated way to increase the company’s market power, resources based, and technological know-how. Many studies have been done on the argument of when should an acquirer proposes a deal with the target firm, what does acquirer seeks for as a result of the takeovers. More importantly, how acquirer differentiates each target option and selects the right one for the synergy or value-creation. Thus, this research aims to analyze the announcement returns of acquirers with different CEO characteristics.
In this paper, we focus on the role of acquirer CEOs, as the key decision-maker for acquisition deals, their impacts on the target selection process, and the outcome after implementation. We included CEO duality, gender, and age as the main independent variables affect how bidders consider the acquisition of private target companies. Furthermore, we conducted three days, five days, and seven days event windows to calculate acquirers’ cumulative abnormal returns after the deals. As expected, acquisition of private target companies made by duality, male and senior CEOs yielding higher significant positive returns compared to the deals made by non-duality, female, young CEOs, respectively.

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