Beyond the accession event: Joint regional membership duration and completion of cross-border acquisitions

Cross-border acquisition (CBA) completion is often hindered by institutional barriers, imposing substantial costs on deal participants. While regional integration aims to reduce such barriers, prior research predominantly treats regional integration as a discrete accession event, leaving post-accession adaptation dynamics and their underlying mechanisms underexplored. Drawing on new institutional economics and social learning theory, we argue that joint regional membership duration increases CBA completion likelihood, with country-dyadic M&A stock serving as the mediating carrier via the sequential pathways of institutional alignment and social learning. We further examine how initial regulatory distance and cultural distance condition this mechanism. Using a sample of 8009 announced CBAs across the European Union (2010–2022), we find support for the mediation pathway and show that both regulatory and cultural distance weaken this indirect effect. This study advances the literature by moving beyond discrete event-based integration framing and refines the understanding of cross-national distance within integrated regional blocs.