Additional Evidence on the Relation Between Divestiture Announcements and Shareholder Wealth

This paper presents estimates of the effect of voluntary divestiture announcements on shareholder wealth. The results show that both spin‐off and sell‐off announcements tend to have a positive influence on the stock prices of the divesting firms, and that the spin‐offs “outperform” the sell‐offs on the day of the event. We also find that the economic gains to the shareholders of the selling and acquiring firms are nearly identical, suggesting that the sell‐off decision is perceived by both investor groups as a positive net present value (NPV) transaction.