Cheers!

Professor John Board, Dean of Henley Business School and Director of the ICMA Centre, was recently interviewed by the Financial Times on the subject of financial regulation and what business schools can do to help create a safer financial industry.

"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.

A lot is being written in the daily press about the immediate financial consequences of the triggering of Article 50. Depending on which source you use and at what time of the day a short piece has been written and posted online, the sterling seems to be rocketing or plummeting, retreating or correcting from a steep drop. The narrative is similar when people are trying to connect Article 50 with the current path of the FTSE 100 or when contemplating on the immediate implications for businesses in the UK. Most of this is just clutter.