How Europe Recovered from the Black Death – Recovery Podcast Series - Part 1

"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.

ICMA Centre Visiting Fellow Dr Keith Arundale was featured in the November 2018 issue of the ICAEW’s Corporate Financier magazine. The article “Learning from the Competition” was based on Keith’s PhD research into the difference in investment practices of European and US venture capital firms and in their structural characteristics and the wider environment in which the firms operate, including cultural differences and attitudes to risk. Keith’s thesis is that these differences contribute to the lower historic performance of European VC funds compared to US VC funds.

Financial history experts from Henley Business School’s ICMA Centre are to investigate the possible existence of a real estate bubble in medieval England. The University of Reading has recently won a research project grant worth almost £200,000 from the Leverhulme Trust.[1] The research team, comprising Professors Adrian Bell and Chris Brooks, will examine in detail the workings of the English real estate market in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.