Financial Times: Adaptable managers help companies pull trough
A study on UK companies’ survival rate co-authored by Geoff Meeks and Geoffrey Whittington featured in the Financial Times. The study, inspired by natural selection theory, finds that only 19 of 1,513 UK companies (1.26%) survived over the biblical “threescore…
Corporate Darwinism
Only 19 of 1,513 UK companies survived 70 years after mandatory consolidated accounts in 1948, says natural selection-inspired study at Cambridge Judge Business School. Business has long been portrayed in survival-of-the-fittest ("dog-eat-dog") and scriptural ("David and Goliath battle") terminology. A…
Shadow pills and visible value
Dr Scott B. Guernsey The "poison pill" (formally known as a "shareholder rights plan") has a long and contentious history in the United States as a tactic to deter takeovers.[1] While details can vary across different implementations, the key defensive…
Hiring ex-advisors of target firms pays off for acquirers
Acquiring firms that hire targets’ former advisors pay lower takeover premiums and reduce the likelihood of competing bids, says study co-authored by Cambridge Judge Business School academic. Acquiring firms that hire the former advisors of their targets "take advantage of…
Conflicting motives, strategies and outcomes in merger and acquisition activity
By Peter Williamson, Honorary Professor of International Management at Cambridge Judge Business School Creating oligopolies? Reducing in healthy competition? Up go the prices and fees; down goes the service and/or product quality. Customers are put in a stranglehold. There is…
Restating firms less likely to receive takeover bids
'Higher information risk' scares off would-be acquirers of restating companies, says paper co-authored at Cambridge Judge Business School. Companies that restate financial results may look weak, shaky or plagued by poor accounting, but such firms are in fact "significantly less…
Crafty hostile takeovers
While the UK is unlikely to introduce American or Japanese "poison pill" remedies in hostile takeovers, boards of UK companies could be given more autonomy to balance worker and shareholder interests, says Simon Deakin, Professor of Law at Cambridge University…
