Abstract: Managers are the intermediary factors for enterprises to perceive changes in the external environment, and also the links between the internal and external information and resources when enterprises are resetting. Taking the M&A events of listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2005 to 2015 as samples, this paper investigates the impact of macro-monetary policy and managers’ overconfidence on the performance of corporate mergers and acquisitions from the perspective of the interaction between managers’ irrational characteristics and the external economic environment based on the behavioral finance theory. The findings show that the situation of monetary policy can significantly affect the M&A performance of enterprises. When the monetary policy is relatively loose, corporate M&A performance is poor; at the same time, managers’ overconfidence will enhance the negative impact of monetary policy on M&A performance. Further analysis shows that credit channel is an important mechanism for monetary policy to affect the M&A performance. The adjustment effects of managerial overconfidence on the relationship between monetary policy and M&A performance are different due to the difference between corporate characteristics and external governance mechanism, which is mainly reflected in non-state-owned enterprises and non-competitive enterprises.

Key words: monetary policy; managerial overconfidence; M&A performance