Two staff gain academic promotions

The ICMA Cente, Henley Business School, is proud to welcome visiting academic, and returning alumni, Assistant Professor Manohar Lal, of the ITM Institute of Financial Markets, Mumbai, India, who will be undertaking research at Reading from 7 March – 25 March 2012.

"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 John Board, Dean of Henley Business School and Director of the ICMA Centre, was recently interviewed by the Financial Times on the subject of financial regulation and what business schools can do to help create a safer financial industry.