Nearly £1 million funding awarded to new research project on the Peasants' Revolt

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) evaluates research and its impact every six years. Henley Business School faculty were entered into two units of assessment in the national 2014 REF. Both units received excellent results.

"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.

Dr Ioannis Oikonomou and Professor Chris Brooks’ work on the connection between firm sustainability and the pricing of corporate bonds was recently honoured with the Outstanding Publication Award from the Financial Review academic journal.