The Conversation: Black Death and the coronavirus

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) evaluates research and its impact every six years. Henley Business School faculty were entered into two units of assessment in the national 2014 REF. Both units received excellent results.

We are proud to share that ICMA Centre academics Professor George Alexandridis and Dr Nikolaos Antypas, together with co-author Dr Vicky Y. Lee (University of Greenwich), have received both the Best Paper Award and the Readers’ Choice Award at the European Financial Management Association (EFMA) 2025 Annual Conference that took place in June 2025 in Athens, Greece.

Infrastructure is the new buzzword in finance these days even though infrastructure has been important at least since the days when the Romans built their roads across Britain and Europe. The difference today is that increasingly the government says it cannot finance such infrastructure - roads, railways, power generation, telecoms, airports etc. The telecoms industry is already completely privately owned in most countries as are an increasing number of airports across the world. But governments everywhere are now looking ever more to public private partnerships (PPPs) to provide the annual funding (the annual revenues required to service bank loan and bond interest payments and capital repayments and equity dividends) as well as the actual financing (the arranging of bank loans, bond issues and equity share issues) to provide the cash up-front.