Premium Payment Analysis - HELP

[Chris_Banana]

Dear all

I am currently writing my master thesis about the influence of macroeconomic factors on takeover premium payments in mergers and acquisition. I have collected (which was as everybody knows a pain :)) all datas. Since I have never done statistical analysis before due to my legal background I have the following questions:

My macroeconomic datas are either quarterly or monthly. On the other hand my data points for takeovers are spread all over the time, for some months I got no deals for others I got 5 etc etc. How can I best match this "differences" between the factor to get the statistically correct result? Is there a possiblity to make the data fit in Eviews or do I have to prepare them in excel and what would be your first steps?

How can I best find out whether certain independent variables are lagged?

I know it might be quite simple for you folks to answer them, but for me as a beginner it is difficult, even though I am working with some literature.

Many thanks in advance for your great support, I really appreciate it.

Best

[trubador]

Your questions may be simple, but I can assure that answers to them are not. You should be more specific to get help and make some progress. It may be a good idea to refer to literature you mention and ask for help for the similar type of analyses you see in those articles. Data preparation and preliminary data analysis can be very challanging for the studies like yours.