What did Debenhams do wrong?

"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 ICMA Centre's Dr Marcel Prokopczuk has much to celebrate this week. Dr Prokopczuk who joined the Centre in 2009, received a promotion on the 1st of July to Senior Lecturer and yesterday was awarded a University Teaching and Learning prize as well as being awarded a British Academy research project grant.

The ICMA Centre is delighted to announce the winner of this year's Solidus Securities Scholarship, MSc student Eleana Kitsara.