Auditable Economic Data Analytics for Acquisition Premiums: A Provenance-Aware SEC Filing Study
Main Article Content
Keywords
acquisition premium, public M&A transactions, SEC filings, data provenance, predictive benchmarking
Abstract
An acquisition premium is difficult to verify after a target delists or when a database no longer states its price benchmark. We assembled a cash-deal sample from SEC filings and the public MarkupMnA release. The 152 index entries correspond to 151 released agreement files; cash-term, filing, and premium checks retain 21 transactions. Premium sentences use distinct comparators. The primary analysis therefore keeps the ten observations tied to a dated pre-announcement close and reports the remaining eleven only as a sensitivity set. On identical leave-one-out folds, we compare the training-fold median and mean with OLS, Ridge, and Huber, using cash offer price and agreement length. None of the regressions beats the median for MAE and the mean for RMSE. The result is an auditable benchmark with a limited negative finding, not a causal or model-superiority claim.
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