By Dana Mattioli And Dana Cimilluca 

The most active mergers-and-acquisitions market in years sped into an even higher gear Monday, as companies took advantage of rising stock prices to announce more than $100 billion in takeover deals.

A pair of giant tie-ups pushed global M&A volume over the $3 trillion mark for the year, in a sign the corporate buying spree is alive and well despite recent market volatility, tighter regulation and the collapse of some large attempted combinations. In the biggest deal announced this year, Actavis PLC agreed to buy Botox-maker Allergan Inc. for $66 billion, while Halliburton Co. sealed a $34.6 billion takeover of oil-services rival Baker Hughes Inc.

At roughly $3.1 trillion, the current dollar volume of announced deals and offers globally is higher than in any full year since 2007, according to data tracker Dealogic.

Deal makers point to a number of factors behind companies' yen for mergers, including cheap credit and lofty stock prices--both driven by easy-money policies from the Federal Reserve and other global central banks grappling with sluggish economic growth.

The takeover surge is a boon to the investment banks and law firms that advise companies on deals, often for fees that run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Usually, a bank will charge a fee measured as a percentage of the overall size of the deal, so the bigger the takeover, the larger the fee.

In 2014, revenue from advising on M&A for banks globally has hit $17.7 billion, according to Dealogic, up 14% over this time last year.

Strong share prices give chief executives the confidence to make bold acquisitions, especially when the deals are paid for at least in part with the acquirer's shares, as is the case with both Actavis and Halliburton.

Takeover deals are particularly attractive now because they can lead to vast cost savings amid lackluster economic activity.

The two big tie-ups announced Monday are both expected to generate in the neighborhood of $2 billion of such so-called synergies.

"The CEO is saying right now: 'If I can acquire that company, and I can use my stock to buy it, then that's a fair trade,' " said Joseph Perella, a longtime Wall Street banker. "The seller is saying, 'I can get a good price, and no tree grows to the sky forever.' "

Mr. Perella, who co-founded merger-advisory boutique Perella Weinberg Partners, predicts the current M&A boom will last at least another six to 12 months. After that, a number of factors, including the approach of the 2016 presidential election, make predictions more challenging, he said.

The deal market is on a tear. Global takeover activity has increased 32% over last year's total at this point, according to Dealogic.

The M&A market took a long time to come back after the financial crisis brought many companies' deal ambitions to a halt. Even though several of the present financial ingredients have been in place for a while--like a strong equity market and cheap debt--it wasn't until this year that companies began taking advantage of them in earnest.

One new development deal makers point to is the warm reception many takeover announcements have received from investors, including those owning shares in the acquirer, a group that traditionally takes the most skeptical view of deals.

Once some companies started buying, others gained the confidence to follow suit, or didn't want to miss out to a rival on a potential target, advisers say. Another theme in the current boom is that companies often are sticking with acquisitions that bolster lines of business in which they are already strong rather than venturing into new territory.

"Good deals beget more good deals," said Scott Barshay, head of the corporate department at law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. "Companies are going after targets within their core competencies, and when you add in the price of debt being as cheap as it is, that helps tremendously in making a deal look smart," he said.

Activist investors have also in many cases been a catalyst for M&A, urging some companies to put up a "for sale" sign or divest businesses. Pet supply retailer PetSmart Inc., for example, is in the middle of an auction that was spurred by two activist investors who disclosed large stakes and pushed for a sale.

In April, William Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management LP disclosed a 9.7% stake in Allergan. Pershing Square then teamed up with Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. in an attempted takeover of Allergan. Their pursuit appears to have sputtered with Allergan's agreement to be sold to Actavis.

To be sure, consolidation isn't good for everyone, and shareholders aren't applauding all deals. Halliburton's stock, for example, fell 11% Monday.

That came after the company announced a deal with antitrust challenges that sported a premium of nearly 50% to the Baker Hughes share price the day before The Wall Street Journal reported talks.

Halliburton stock ended lower Monday than where it traded before news of the deal broke Thursday.

Synergies are often derived primarily from job cuts. Baker Hughes on Monday said in a securities filing that, "to achieve the expected cost-saving synergies, we do expect some head count reductions."

Bankers also caution that merger booms are fragile, and that this one could come to a halt just as quickly as it started. A number of investors fear, for example, that the stock market is overvalued and due for a sharp drop after more than five years of gains.

Such fears arose when financial markets swooned last month. The worries were fed by the collapse of what was at the time the biggest announced takeover of the year--drug maker AbbVie Inc.'s $54 billion deal to buy Shire PLC.

The deal would have been a so-called inversion, a takeover that allows a U.S. company to buy a foreign target and redomicile abroad with a lower tax rate. AbbVie abandoned the agreement after the Treasury Department disclosed rules designed to make such deals less lucrative.

Inversions have been a big driver of deal activity, especially in the health-care industry. Bankers fretted that, together with the market volatility, the rule changes could take some air out of the M&A market.

But with stocks coming back and deal making continuing unabated, the outlook for M&A is as good as it was before, if not better, they now say.

That is in part because, while deal making in the first half of the year was largely dominated by two areas--health-care on the one hand, and telecommunications, media and technology on the other--more sectors have been heating up.

The oil-and-gas industry, for example, had been relatively calm until August, when Kinder Morgan Inc. announced a $43 billion deal to consolidate four pipelines.

The deal between Halliburton and Baker Hughes is the fifth-largest U.S. energy deal since 1995.

Write to Dana Mattioli at dana.mattioli@wsj.com and Dana Cimilluca at dana.cimilluca@wsj.com

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