Business Commons^™

Refocusing Through Discontinued Operations In Response To Acquisitions And Diversification, Richard Lord, Yoshie Saito

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We examine how prior acquisitions and the extent of corporate diversification affect decisions to discontinue operations. These choices comprise a very important class of publicly announced disposal decisions, and analyzing them allows us to utilize a much larger sample than most prior studies of divestitures. We employ a multinomial logistic regression setting to test our three hypotheses; this framework allows us to assess the difference in choices regarding positive- and negative-valued announcements of discontinued operations. We find that firms are less liable to report negative-valued divestitures in the year of an acquisition, and are more likely to discontinue operations, especially …