As the overall market has improved, companies that completed merger and acquisition deals during the third quarter lagged the performance of their deal-avoiding peers by 2.8 percent, according to a new study by Towers Perrin.

In the second quarter of the year, by contrast, when the market was down overall, the deal-making group outperformed peers by 8.5 percent.

The deal performance picture is more positive year to date, the study noted, with deal makers that completed their transactions since January outperforming the market by 2.6 percent.

"The most current results underscore the level of volatility in the market and in deal making broadly, as well as the gap between perception and reality in this area," said Mary Cianni, leader of Towers Perrin’s global M&A practice, in a statement. "In our data from the second quarter – when conventional wisdom suggested deals would be problematic – deal-makers reaped some rewards for their courage, relative to the market overall. This quarter, by contrast, when people were far more optimistic about mergers and acquisitions, actual deals that closed in the quarter did not perform at par with the market overall."

The study examined the performance of all global transactions with a value greater than $100 million on a quarterly basis against the MCSI World Index. Performance is analyzed from six months before deal announcement through to the market close at the end of the relevant quarter.