Professor John Board appointed as the new Dean of Henley Business School

For a brief moment on Tuesday 21st July, the online database of medieval soldiers (http://www.medievalsoldier.org/) hosted at the ICMA Centre, was the news! This database of soldiers serving the English crown between 1369-1454 and including the names of men-at-arms and archers who served at famous battles such as Agincourt in 1415, made the front page of the BBC website, was the most shared site on BBC news online, and interviews were given to BBC Radio Four and 5Live, local radio and even the national radio broadcaster in Canada. Some 250,000 service records are now available to freely search and the database recorded some 125,000 hits on Tuesday alone. The database has gone from strength to strength and this publicity has made the online database extremely popular, and it has now registered 3.5 million hits in just three months - demonstrating the interest of our research to the public at large.

"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.

The 32nd floor of the International Trade Centre in Beijing proved to be an excellent venue for the first welcome event for ICMA Centre students joining programmes in Reading in October 2013.