Is the English Premier League owners' and directors' test fit for purpose?

"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.

A recent research paper, “Strategic risk shifting and idiosyncratic volatility”, by Dr Nicholas Chen with his co-authors, has been accepted for presentation at the 2015 Western Finance Association Meetings. The conference is highly prestigious with an acceptance rate from submitted papers of only 8%.

There has been a lot of anecdotal discussion around the volatility of the price of bitcoin and whether or not a bubble is currently present in cryptocurrencies. Much of this impassioned debate is based around speculative trading activities but what would be the outcome if we considered its place as part of a balanced portfolio of investments?