Divestments in banking. preliminary evidence on the role of external factors

Abstract

Divestment constitutes an important method of corporate restructuring. Despite this fact, the banking literature on divestment is very limited. In this text, we try to remediate partially to the shortcomings of the existing literature by examining empirically the role of external factors. Using a large sample of 313 transactions, we have established that parent companies originate from countries with relatively high accumulated wealth, slow GDP growth, stable macroeconomic situation and dominant bank intermediation in financial system. The acquirers in turn come from poorer countries with faster economic growth and relatively more market-oriented financial systems. Those results broadly conform with the predictions of three hypotheses formulated in the text, namely the weak performance hypothesis, the corporate governance hypothesis and the rebalancing hypothesis.