More than a third of the total value of deals announced in 2014 came from large deals — with more than 90 percent of that coming from large deals by corporate acquirers, especially in the healthcare and technology, media, and telecommunications sectors. That's something of a surprise, both because previous research found that large-deal M&A strategies are riskier to execute and create less value than programmatic M&A and because, for the first time in our reckoning, investors seemed to approve. In fact, since 1998, the average announcement effects have never shown investors to be as optimistic about large deals as they have been in the past few years.
