The time to completion of a legal merger: General concepts, statistical analysis and the case of Poland

The legal process involved in domestic mergers has been considered. European Union regulations were investigated, as well as their direct transposition into Polish legislation. The process itself always consists of managerial, ownership and registration phases. Nevertheless, these phases are not homogeneous and may take different courses depending on the provisions prescribed by the regulations. Several methods of measuring the time to complete mergers have been presented. In the empirical part of the article, the definition of the private time to completion has been adopted which assumes that that the procedure starts by drafting the terms of the merger and ends with the registration of the merger. The influence of different provisions on this measure has been analyzed for the case of Polish domestic mergers. Moreover, statistical reasoning has been conducted for this market showing that several recent legal amendments have shortened the legal procedure involved in consolidation. Finally, some conclusions and suggestions for future research have been presented in the paper.