The Role of Equity Underwriting Relationships in Mergers and Acquisitions* Hsuan-Chi Chen Anderson School of Management, University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA E-mail:
[email protected] Keng-Yu Ho Department of Finance, National Taiwan University Taipei City 106, Taiwan E-mail:
[email protected] Pei-Shih Weng Department of Finance, National Sun Yat-sen University Kaohsiung City 804, Taiwan E-mail:
[email protected] Chia-Wei Yeh Department of Banking and Finance, National Chi Nan University Nantou County 545, Taiwan E-mail:
[email protected] This draft: September 17, 2020 * This paper has benefited from comments and suggestions from Sevinc Cukurova, Ying-Chou Lin, and Hilmi Songur. We thank seminar and conference participants at National Central University and the meetings of Desert Finance Festival, Eastern Finance Association, and Financial Management Association for their helpful comments and suggestions. Hsuan-Chi Chen gratefully acknowledges support from Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico. Address for correspondence: Hsuan-Chi Chen, Anderson School of Management, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA. E-mail:
[email protected] 1 The Role of Equity Underwriting Relationships in Mergers and Acquisitions Abstract We examine the role of equity underwriting relationships in subsequent mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Firms, either the bidders or targets, tend to choose their M&A advisors with prior equity underwriting relationships. Consistent with the cost-saving hypothesis, retaining their prior underwriters as future advisors is related to cost reduction in the M&A advisory. Firms also experience shorter deal duration if they hire relationship advisors.