RDP 2026-04: Tracking Mergers and Acquisitions Using Australian Administrative Data 1. Introduction

Australia has been rare among advanced economies in not having had a formal requirement for firms to ‘pre-notify’ the competition authority of an upcoming merger.^[1] While this situation will change from 2026 when Australia introduces a formal obligation to notify, up until now notification has been purely voluntary. The absence of any formal reporting requirement has contributed to a lack of comprehensive data on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in Australia. This incomplete view of M&A activity has limited the ability of Australian researchers and policymakers to derive policy-relevant insights into patterns in M&A activity and the effects of that activity on the Australian economy. For example, without comprehensive data it is difficult to assess how factors such as firm size and industry affect the pattern of M&A activity, let alone the impact of mergers on the employees, productivity and broader performance of the merging firms.

In this paper, we seek to address these gaps by building the first M&A database using Australian administrative microdata. The use of administrative data for research has expanded greatly in recent years with the increasing availability of powerful, linked government datasets. By building the database and methodology, and making it accessible in the Australian Bureau of Statistics secure Datalab environment, we hope to enable future researchers to analyse the economic consequences of M&A. This can help to inform policy to support a resilient, dynamic and productive private sector in Australia. We also hope this database and methodology will support other important research that would benefit from information on M&A, such as research into the effects of firm closure on worker outcomes.

As mentioned above, this new database also comes at a critical juncture for Australia's merger system, as it moves from a voluntary to a mandatory and suspensory regime from 1 January 2026. This means mergers above designated monetary thresholds will be prohibited from proceeding without approval from the competition authority, and failure to notify such mergers will render them void. The specific thresholds set out in legislation are as follows:

• Australian turnover of the combined businesses is above $200 million, and either the business or assets being acquired has Australian turnover of more than $50 million or global transaction value above $250 million.
• A business with Australian turnover of more than $500 million buying a smaller business or assets with Australian turnover above $10 million.

We make use of these thresholds in our analysis below, allowing our new database to provide some early insights into the nature of mergers that may be captured.^[2] Similarly, our database can help inform these key policy settings going forward.

While the focus of the paper is on the methodology and database, we provide some initial insight to demonstrate its value. Three key insights emerge:

1. The number of mergers was higher over the 2000s, before declining in the early 2010s and then recovering somewhat in the late 2010s. Part of the more recent pick up reflected increasing acquisitions by very large firms.
2. A sizable share of acquisitions are made by firms acquiring multiple different businesses over time, often referred to as ‘serial’ or ‘creeping’ acquisitions. These acquisitions are particularity prevalent in the Care and Medical Services sectors.
3. Takeover targets are most likely to be medium-sized entities with higher profitability and lower productivity. They are also likely to have a larger number of patents, though many also have no patents. This may suggest that target firms that do have patents, tend to have patents on moderately complex technologies with patents attached to the technology. Acquirers are, unsurprisingly, likely to be large and likely to have trademarks.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides a short literature review and Section 3 steps through the data and methodology for Australia. Sections 4 and 5 document some initial insights from the database, looking at serial acquisitions and what types of firms are more likely to be acquirers or targets, before Section 6 concludes and discusses next steps.

Footnotes

‘Pre-notify’ is used interchangeably with ‘notify’ in the merger context, with both referring to a requirement to alert the competition authority before a merger is completed. Merger control systems in many overseas jurisdictions are also ‘suspensory’ insofar as the merger cannot be completed until cleared by the competition authority. [1]

The new laws also include tailored notification rules for ‘serial acquisitions’, to deal with the strategy of larger businesses progressively accumulating market share via separate small transactions that would otherwise not be notifiable. The serial acquisition thresholds are not the focus of this paper's analysis but could easily be incorporated into future work. [2]