Conclusion
We examine the market reaction to the adoption of poison pills that management claims are designed to protect firms'
NOL related deferred tax assets. The NOL poison pills are unique in that they would seem to clearly benefit shareholders by
preserving a valuable asset that could be unintentionally impaired due to complex tax rules. However, they also come with a
lower trigger threshold (typically around 4.99%) because the Section 382 limitation applies when five percent or greater
shareholders increase their ownership by more than 50 percentage points over a three-year period. The lower trigger
percentages make NOL poison pills a more effective mechanism for entrenching existing management than traditional non-NOL poison pills with trigger percentages closer to ten percent. The unique characteristics of NOL poison pills make it
unclear how investors will respond to their adoption.
We provide insight into whether investors find management's claim that these poison pills will enhance firm value by
preserving a significant asset credible or whether investors believe the potential agency costs arising from increased
managerial entrenchment outweigh the potential benefits of the NOL poison pills. We find significant negative abnormal
returns over the 3-day and 5-day windows surrounding the announcement of NOL poison pill adoptions over the period
2000–2012. The results suggest that in general investors do not find management's stated purpose for the NOL poison pills
(i.e., to protect a valuable tax asset) credible and instead believe the NOL poison pills will increase agency costs. We also
examine the market reaction to announcements of non-NOL poison pill adoptions over the same time period and find that
the reaction to these pills is also negative and significant. Although some earlier studies find a positive market reaction to
the adoption of non-NOL poison pills, our results suggest that the market reaction to both NOL and non-NOL poison pills is
negative in the more recent time period after controlling for confounding events. The negative reaction could be the result
of proxy advisory firms such as RiskMetrics and ISS opposing poison pills.
We conduct a series of cross-sectional tests to examine whether investors' response to the adoption of NOL poison pills
varies depending on specific firm characteristics. The results suggest that investors respond more negatively when the
firm could have carried back the NOL and received an immediate refund, and respond more positively when the firm has
a higher likelihood of being profitable enough in the future to utilize the NOL carryforward. These results suggest that
the market reaction varies according to how credible investors view management's stated purpose for adopting the pill. We
also find that investors react more negatively when the firm has a staggered board of directors, which makes it easier for
management to use the pill to prevent a takeover and thus to entrench themselves. In summary, we find meaningful
variation in the market reaction to NOL poison pill adoptions that is consistent with investors being astute both in terms of
tax and governance issues