BBC Radio Berkshire: The Peasants' Revolt

"Institutional Cross-ownership and Corporate Strategy: The Case of Mergers and Acquisitions" by Professor Chris Brooks, Dr Yeqin Zeng, and PhD Zhong Chen has been awarded Best Corporate Finance Paper at the 2016 Southern Finance Association annual conference. About the paper: The paper provides new evidence on the important role of institutional investors in affecting corporate strategy. We study institutional investors who hold stocks of both acquirers and targets before the announcements of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The existence of these institutional cross-owners not only increases the probability of two firms merging, but also affects the outcomes of M&As. Institutional cross-ownership reduces target firm prices, lowers completion probabilities of deals with negative acquirer announcement returns, and increases the use of stock payment in M&A transactions. Furthermore, deals with high institutional cross-ownership have lower transaction costs and disclose more transparent financial statement information.

Dr Keith Arundale's new book Venture Capital Performance: a comparative study of investment practices in Europe and the USA has been reviewed in the ICAEW Corporate Financier magazine.

The ICMA Centre is very proud to congratulate PhD student Yingying Wu on her receipt of a Best Paper Award at the 19th Global Finance Conference, taking place at DePaul University in Chicago on May 23-25, 2012. The prize was awarded for the paper “Commodity Futures Prices: More Evidence on Forecast Power, Risk Premia and the Theory of Storage” (co-authored with Chris Brooks and Marcel Prokopczuk).