This paper examines the impact of takeover law enforcement on corporate acquisitions. We use the European Takeover Directive as a natural experiment, which harmonizes takeover law across countries, while leaving its enforcement to the discretion of individual countries. We exploit this heterogeneity in enforcement quality across countries in a difference-in-differences-in-differences model, while employing an overall inductive research approach, following Karpoff and Whittry's (2018) recommendation. We find that acquirer returns increase in countries with improvements in takeover law, driven by better target selection and lower cost of financing. The increase in acquirer returns is lower in weak enforcement jurisdictions, which we identify by developing a novel Takeover Law Enforcement Index (TLEI). The findings show that takeover law can mitigate agency conflicts, but its true value depends on its enforcement. Our results are strongly robust to alternative model specifications.

本文研究了收购法律对公司收购的影响。我们将《欧洲收购指令》用作一项自然实验，它可以协调各国之间的收购法律，同时让各国自行决定执行该法律。我们采用差异归纳模型，利用国家间执法质量的异质性，同时采用总体归纳法研究方法，遵循Karpoff和Whittry（2018）的建议。我们发现，在更好地选择目标和降低融资成本的推动下，随着收购法律的改善，收购方的回报也有所增加。在执行力较弱的司法管辖区中，收购方收益的增加较低，我们通过制定新的《接管法律执行指数》（TLEI）来确定。调查结果表明，接管法可以减轻代理冲突，但其真正价值取决于其执行。我们的结果对于替代模型规格具有很强的鲁棒性。