2006 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. The volume and magnitude of mergers and acquisitions continue to grow on a global basis (Hitt, Harrison, and Ireland, 2001). Although the decade of the 1980s, produced 55.000 merger and acquisition transactions at a total value of $1.3 trillion, known as "merger mania." the 1990s produced more than twice that number, at a value of approximately $11 trillion. One observer suggested that the merger wave of the 1980s was a tidal wave during the 1990s, becoming CEOs' favorite growth strategy in the process (Sirower, 1998b).
