Culture and experience associate A with superior quality. In the marketing of dual-class IPOs, issuers are mindful of this preference. For years after IPO issuance, inferior voting rights shares labeled Class A enjoy higher market valuations and smaller voting premiums than do Class B shares.

In this paper, we empirically examine the relationship between government ownership, synchronicity and M&A performance in Chinese market. We found strong evidence to support “Helping Hand Hypothesis” that bidders with high government ownership yield better performance in both the short run and the long run. We also document a negative relationship between synchronicity measure and M&A performance. Various explanations have been offered to explain this phenomenon. In addition, we find both political influence and stock market valuation play an important role to forecast M&A outcome in China market. Within hot political period, government-related bidders yield better performance in the short run, while in high valuation period, public bidders receive higher premium.

This paper documents the relations between firms' pre-offer market valuations and takeover behavior, and evaluates their consistency with the Q theory and the misvaluation theory of takeovers. We employ two valuation measures: price/book ratios and ratios of price to residual income model value. Market valuations of bidders and targets influence the means of payment chosen, the mode of acquisition, the premia paid, target hostility to the offer, the likelihood of offer success, and bidder and target announcement period stock returns. The evidence is broadly consistent with both hypotheses. The evidence for the Q hypothesis is stronger in the pre-1990 period than in the 1990-2000 period, whereas the evidence for the misvaluation hypothesis is stronger in the 1990-2000 period than in the pre-1990 period.