This note proposes the continuous treatment approach as a valuable alternative to propensity score matching for evaluating
economic effects of merger and acquisitions (M&As). This framework allows considering the variation in treatment intensities
explicitly, and it does not call for an arbitrary definition of cutoff values in traded ownership shares to construct a binary
treatment indicator. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach using data from European M&As and by relying on the example
of post-M&A employment effects. The empirical exercise reveals some heterogeneities over the whole distribution of acquired
ownership shares and across different types of M&As and country groups.