Are mergers and acquisitions socially responsible? Evidence from the banking industry

Acquisitions have generally been portrayed as a means to improving shareholders’ wealth. To date, the debate regarding how to measure acquisition performance has generally discarded the idea that performance should reflect the interests of stakeholders other than shareholders. In this chapter, I advance the importance of enlarging the domain of acquisition performance to include stakeholders other than shareholders. Drawing on literature streams related to corporate social performance and stakeholder theory and providing empirical data from an Italian merger in the banking industry, I demonstrate how the failure to consider neglected but relevant stakes put at risk by acquisitions, such as those of employees and consumers, produces measures of acquisition performance that do not do justice to the multiplicity of outcomes that these deals generally cause.