SIRCA Mergers and Acquisitions collection

Overview

SIRCA’s Mergers and Acquisitions collection provides data on Australian M&A transactions.

The code in this note uses the packages listed below, plus the duckdb package.¹ This note was written using Quarto and compiled with RStudio, an integrated development environment (IDE) for working with R. The source code for this note is available here.

library(tidyverse)
library(arrow)

Getting SIRCA Merger and Acquisitions data

SIRCA supplies the data we will use as two compressed CSV files. I provide the code needed to prepare the data for the analysis below. I merely assume that you have access to SIRCA and have downloaded the raw data from SIRCA along the lines discussed below.² Once you have done that you should be able to execute all the code in this note and thereby produce all the output (tables and graphs) contained herein.

You should download these files and place them as is in a single sirca directory and you should edit the code below to tell my script where to look for that directory.

In my case, sirca is found in ~/Dropbox/raw_data and so I execute the following command in RStudio:

Sys.setenv(RAW_DATA_DIR = "~/Dropbox/raw_data")

The script also needs to know where to put the processed data files, which will be in parquet format. You should edit the following line to refer to a location on your computer that you would like to use to store processed SIRCA data.

Sys.setenv(DATA_DIR = "~/Dropbox/pq_data")

pq_dir <- file.path(Sys.getenv("DATA_DIR"), "sirca")
ma_delisted_file <- file.path(Sys.getenv("RAW_DATA_DIR"), 
                              "sirca",
                              "Delisted_MergerAndAcquisition-2025-08.csv.gz")

ma_delisted <- read_csv(ma_delisted_file, show_col_types = FALSE)


ma_other_file <- file.path(Sys.getenv("RAW_DATA_DIR"), 
                              "sirca",
                              "MergerAndAcquisition-2025-08.csv.gz")

ma_other <- read_csv(ma_other_file, show_col_types = FALSE)

si_ms_ma <-
  ma_delisted |>
  union_all(ma_other) |> 
  write_parquet(sink = file.path(pq_dir, "si_ms_ma.parquet"))

Footnotes

1. Execute install.packages(c("tidyverse", "arrow", "duckdb", "DBI")) within R to install all the packages you need to run the code in this note.

2. See SIRCA’s documentation for details on getting the data.