The Role of CEO Cognition in Cross-Border Acquisition Pace: Evidence from US Serial Acquirers.

The fast pacing of cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) can be critical to a firm's competitiveness. But the antecedents of a firm's ability to quickly execute serial CBAs and thus build a strategic momentum have been disregarded in the international strategy literature. We focus on the role of CEO cognition in serial CBAs and argue that firms are better able to compress the time between deals in a target country when a CEO has more acquisition experience in the focal firm in the target country and when this CEO shares a similar cognitive frame with the target country due to cultural ancestry links. Using a sample of CBAs by 348 US serial acquirers and 428 CEOs in 34 host countries, our findings support most of our predictions. CEO acquisition experience matters. A similar cultural heritage magnifies the CEO acquisition experience effect, thus increasing the CEO's absorptive capacity in experiential learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]