M&A in the Italian Energy Market

The Italian Energy industry has undergone changes and it had to adapt to alterations given by the economic and environmental trend in the last decades, especially in the last months with the war outbreak. The transition to the green economy and to the renewable energy has put this market in front of challenges of various perspectives leading it to a new framework. The passage from a centralised to a more decentralised arrangement, both in terms of consumption and production, has affected the organisational structure of the interested firms. Furthermore, new EU policies have been enacted in order to face the severe environmental issue, using the energy efficiency as a tool to incentivise the improvement on sustainability and renewability. This paper investigates the Italian energy industry and the effects given by M&A in it. Mergers and Acquisitions are operations relevant not only from a financial or corporate point of view, they imply effects on the economy related to the market and its forces. We focus our study on the market share of the firms involved in the research, as this measure allows us to detect the firm's position in the market. We build a model which studies the variation over time of the market share in relation to the firm's M&A, since the latter imply a higher concentration in the market, and to the technical efficiency of the industry's firms, estimated by the stochastic frontier analysis. In addition, we include in the analysis all the variables that may affect the dependent variable such as the investments, geographic position, M&A volume and others. The analysis makes use of data on M&A collected on Bloomberg and data on firms' balance sheet collected by AIDA, both of them for the period from 2011 to 2022. According to this analysis, this paper sets his aim on the study of the energy market on the basis of the evolution which interested the most recent past.