Business Acquisition Disclosures: The Effect of Identifying Intangible Assets on Investors’ Judgments

Disclosures about a business acquisition help investors understand what assets are acquired and how the acquiring company plans to benefit from the transaction. However, in practice, these disclosures exhibit significant variation and often fall short of providing meaningful information to investors. Our experiment provides evidence that separately identifying intangible assets acquired in a business combination (i.e., what was acquired) can compensate for shortcomings in an acquirer’s disclosures about how the transaction will benefit the acquiring firm. An additional experiment indicates that the benefits of separately identifying acquired assets do not extend to tangible assets, suggesting our insights may be unique to intangibles. This paper was accepted by Ranjani Krishnan, accounting. Funding: Z. Leitter acknowledges funding from the Eugene and Dora Bonham Endowment Fund. L. Koonce acknowledges funding from the Deloitte Foundation. B. White acknowledges funding from a Clifford H. Whitcomb Faculty Fellowship. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02673 .