The impact of M&A strategy on the cultivation of chain leader enterprises: comparative empirical study of horizontal and vertical merger

Abstract

This study develops a comparative empirical framework for examining how horizontal and vertical mergers and acquisitions (M&A) influence the development of chain-leader capability among Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms. Chain-leader capability is conceptualized as a firm’s capacity to organize and upgrade an industrial chain through innovation leadership, market influence, interfirm coordination, operational efficiency, and resilience. The framework combines the resource-based view, transaction cost economics, dynamic capability theory, and supply-chain governance. It proposes a firm-year panel for 2010–2024, classifies completed transactions using industry relatedness and input-output linkages, and constructs a multidimensional Chain-Leader Capability Index using entropy weighting, with principal-component and recognition-based measures as robustness checks. The empirical sequence comprises firm and year fixed effects, formal comparison of horizontal and vertical coefficients, mechanism analysis through innovation and supply-chain coordination, propensity-score or entropy balancing, staggered difference-in-differences estimation, event-study tests, placebo exercises, and heterogeneity analysis. Unlike studies that evaluate acquisitions only through accounting returns or market reactions, the design focuses on whether M&A strengthens the acquiring firm’s ability to coordinate and stabilize the wider industrial chain. Numerical results are deliberately omitted from this version because the underlying firm-level data were not supplied. The manuscript therefore provides a complete, non-fabricated analysis architecture that can be populated directly with verified database output.

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