Distance Learning Students Celebrate at Graduation

A recent article published in the Wall Street Journal highlights the growing interest in Islamic Finance. The sector is now seen as a thriving industry, with many keen to study the specialised area. Business schools are now tailoring their courses to reflect these needs and structuring degrees to train students in investments that comply with Quranic Law.

"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 new book, edited by Professors Adrian Bell, Chris Brooks and Marcel Prokopczuk, seeks to present the quantitative techniques that are commonly employed in empirical finance research together with real world, state of the art research examples.