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This thesis explores the motives and effects of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in different institutional contexts. The first paper shows that M&As help firms navigate the challenges arising from green policies. It exploits the adoption of the NOx Budget Program (NBP) across U.S. states as an exogenous shock to investigate the impact of climate policy risk on M&As. The results suggest that manufacturers headquartered in NBP-participating states are more likely to initiate M&A deals to reduce future cash flow volatilities and financial distress risks. The M&A involvement is more pronounced for firms with a higher degree of financial distress, firms with greater product market competition, and firms facing more firm-level uncertainty shocks. Further, treated firms are less likely to finance M&A transactions with cash and tend to pay higher takeover premiums to induce target shareholders to accept stock payments. Collectively, this paper revisits the motives and effects of M&As in the context of green policies and supports the neoclassical view of M&As as being an effective tool for diversifying risks and regaining financial strength. The second paper provides evidence that the presence of top-tier advisors increases managers' propensity for withdrawing cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBAs) with poor market returns around the announcement. This effect is stronger for private target acquisitions where information asymmetry is expected to be more pronounced, and for smaller bidders who are likely to lack the expertise to process information on themselves. This suggests that managers assisted by reputable investment banks consider the negative market feedback in informationally challenging deals. This paper provides novel inferences about the informative role of stock markets in shaping advisory roles for cross-border M&As. The third paper finds that managers of Chinese state-sponsored bidders broaden their acquisition targets from the strict patent-intensive sectors ("high-tech" industries only) to the loose patent-intensive sectors (a wider range of technology sectors). In doing so, they satisfy the Chinese government's call to acquire innovative targets, while at the same time they mitigate the resistance of host governments to the growing Chinese influence on the corporate scene. We show that Chinese state-sponsored bidders face fewer setbacks, improve the innovation growth rate, and protect shareholder wealth when they target firms from the loose innovation-intensive sectors.

Although the 3D structures of active and inactive cannabinoid receptors type 2 (CB2) are available, neither the X-ray crystal nor the cryo-EM structure of the CB2-orthosteric ligand-allosteric modulator has been resolved, prohibiting the drug discovery and development of CB2 allosteric modulators (AMs). In the present work, we mainly focused on investigating the potential allosteric binding site(s) of CB2. We applied different algorithms or tools to predict the potential allosteric binding sites of CB2 with the existing agonists. Seven potential allosteric sites can be observed for either CB2-CP55940 or CB2-WIN 55,212-2 complex, among which sites B, C, G, and K are supported by the reported 3D structures of Class A GPCRs coupled with AMs. Applying our novel algorithm toolset-MCCS, we docked three known AMs of CB2 including Ec2la (C-2), trans-β-caryophyllene (TBC), and cannabidiol (CBD) to each site for further comparisons and quantified the potential binding residues in each allosteric binding site. Sequentially, we selected the most promising binding pose of C-2 in five allosteric sites to conduct the molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Based on the results of docking studies and MD simulations, we suggest that site H is the most promising allosteric binding site. We plan to conduct bio-assay validations in the future.