Excerpt
Excerpt
Why Have M&A Contracts Grown? Evidence from Twenty Years of Deals. John Coates, October 26, 2016, Paper, "Over 20 years, M&A contracts have more than doubled in size – from 35 to 88 singlespaced pages in this paper’s font. They have also grown significantly in linguistic complexity – from post-graduate “grade 20” to post-doctoral “grade 30”. A substantial portion (lower bound ~20%) of the growth consists not of mere verbiage but of substantive new terms. These include rational reactions to new legal risks (e.g., SOX, FCPA enforcement, shareholder litigation) as well as to changes in deal and financing markets (e.g., financing conditions, financing covenants, and cooperation covenants; and reverse termination fees)." Link