The impact of mergers and acquisitions on technology learning in the petroleum industry

This paper contributes to the literature by explaining the “direct and indirect effect” of M&As on technology learning and derives a new learning curve model with an additional factor of M&As for the petroleum industry. The paper also conducts comparative empirical analysis to analyze the heterogeneous technological learning process between the traditional integrated oil firms and unconventional oil drilling firms (oil sands). Our empirical studies find that the “direct effect” of M&As on technology learning can be detected at oil sands firms; in addition, the “indirect effect” of M&As on oil firms exists only for integrated oil firms. Furthermore, we also show that the traditional learning-by-doing effect holds only for integrated oil firms, but learning-by-researching exists only for oil sands firms.