ICMA Centre academics collaborate with Climate Bonds Initiative on first Green Bond Investor Survey

A team of five ICMA Centre Students, Richa Patil, Stephane Caps, Peter Bamrud, Andres Acevedo Vega and Bogdan Mihaila, won the CFA Institute Research Challenge UK and moved forward to face off against Europe’s finest in the EMEA Final to win the chance to complete on the global stage.

"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.