¶ … value differences between merging with other companies inside of Western Europe vs. investing in merging with companies in BRIC nations. Thus, mergers and acquisitions from within Western Europe were gathered. These were then compared to mergers of Western European companies with BRIC nations, including Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The data set chosen was to include a span of ten years, from 1999 to 2009. First and foremost, there were more mergers within this time frame than past 2009 based on the fact that the economic crisis in Europe had worsened to a degree that made mergers and acquisitions decline overall in the region. Moreover, after 2009, there were actually increasing trends of BRIC nations investing in acquiring Western European nations, and not the other way around because of declining financial conditions that were weakening the acquisition and leveraging power of many European companies. The period of 1999 to 2009 thus provided a more balanced survey. Companies from a variety of different industries were chosen to be included in the sample, which ended up with a total of ten mergers for each category that of within Western Europe and of Western European companies merging with companies from BRIC nations. The first step was to define the independent and dependent variables. There were three independent variables used in the context of this research. These included the country type (Western European to Western European or Western European to BRIC Nation), transaction value, and the stock price 30 days prior to the merger announcement. Data to fill these three independent variable categories was gathered from a number of sources, including Dorai & Patolahti (2010), Institute of Mergers, Acquisitions, and Alliances (2015), and Reuters (2013). Then the design of this research chose stock price for the year of the merger and a year after as the two dependent variables that would be tested through the regression analysis. As a method for an event study, ADR stock listing prices...

According to a similar study conducted by Wang & Moini (2012) "it is designed to measure whether there is an abnormal stock price effect associated with an unanticipated event (M&A)." Stock prices for these two periods were collected using historical data from Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance. Thus, the research recorded monthly AR stock closing prices for 30 days before merger, 30 days after merger, year after merger, and August 2015. Next, it was important to identify any outliers, which were then removed. In this case, RFS Holdings BV was a clear outlier, as the stock price was well above the others in the sample set. In order to provide the clearest results, this was removed from the sample set.
Once the variables had been appropriately assigned and gathered, it was time to complete the actual regression tests. This study used regression, ANOVA, and residual testing practices in order to determine the level of statistical significance between the chosen variables. In order to determine whether M&A's are more valuable from internally within Western Europe or outside into the BRIC nations, regression analysis was used in this research. This tested the stock price after the merger with a number of variables in order to test for statistical significance to tell whether which scenario was most favorable in regards to later company performance. The performance was measured in this case by the stock prices after the merger. The regression would be able to point out any abnormal stock prices that were either above or below average returns, based on the test of the third variable, stock prices 30 days before the actual merger took place.

In the case of this research, this was conducted in two separate tests, one for stock prices 30 days after the initial merger and the second for a year after the merger. Regression will allow for a p-value…