Nearly £1 million funding awarded to new research project on the Peasants' Revolt

The ICMA Centre at Henley Business school is pleased to announce that it will be host to the 2013 European Financial Management Association (EFMA) annual meeting from 26 – 29 June 2013.

"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.

Professor Simone Varotto analysed the financial reports of UK-listed companies from 1996-2018 and found a surprising pattern in how markets respond to different types of climate disclosures after natural disasters strike.