The impact of countries' cultural indicators on the implementation of Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPAC's).

Details

Supervisors

Thewissen, James

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies ("SPAC's"), which emerged almost three decades ago, have witnessed a boom in popularity since 2020. Until two or three years ago, this acronym was relatively unknown to most people not working in the broad field of finance, but it is now gaining in popularity. While the phenomenon is extremely popular in the United States, SPAC's are slowly emerging on other continents. The SPAC vehicle offers us new opportunities to raise funds and diversify our financial portfolios. SPAC's offer an alternative process with many advantages to become a publicly listed company without going through the traditional lengthy and extremely costly Initial Public Offering (IPO) process. In this thesis, we have collected information on the 2911 SPAC's traded between 2000 and 2022. We will explore and analyse the culture of the SPAC phenomenon. We will highlight the indicators that influence the implementation and success of SPAC's. And we will compare them to the economic and social culture of the different continents of the world. The combination of low risk, high reward and a high degree of control over the entire acquisition process is one of the many strengths of this structure which is becoming increasingly popular amongst investors. Our aim is to show a causal relationship between a country's culture and the indicators analysed. In other words, we wanted to answer the central research question: "How can cultural indicators explain the popularity of SPAC's around the world?”.