BBC Radio Berkshire: The Peasants' Revolt

Tesco has announced the acquisition of Booker for a total of £3.7 billion, aspiring to create a juggernaut in the food industry.

A new research paper, “Institutional Investor Monitoring Motivation and the Marginal Value of Cash” by ICMA academics, Professor Charles Ward, Chao Yin, and Dr Yeqin Zeng, has recently been accepted by Journal of Corporate Finance.

"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.