Management Buyouts of Divisions and Shareholder Wealth

This paper examines the wealth effects to parent company shareholders around the announcement of divisional management buyouts. Despite the relative absence of “arm's‐length” bargaining between buyer and seller, there is no evidence that divisional management buyouts result in reductions in parent company share prices. Instead, small but statistically significant wealth gains are found during the two‐day period surrounding the buyout announcement. This evidence suggests that divisional buyouts reallocate ownership of corporate assets to higher valued uses and that parent company stockholders share in the expected benefits of this change in ownership structure.