As a result of the recently established collaboration between Unigestion, the boutique Swiss Asset Management and Cass Business School's Centre for Asset Management (CAMR), this Breakfast Briefing Series is an opportunity for the academic world and the investment management world to discuss and debate investment methods and techniques, in theory and in practice.

An essential function of securities markets is to discover asset values. The function is critical for an efficient allocation of capital in the economy, as better price discovery in the stock market translates into better capital allocation decisions. For this reason, regulators and academics often see the maximisation of price discovery as an extremely important goal. Market design depends in large part on the decisions of stock exchanges and stock exchanges themselves are now for-profit firms. Their income derives from trading revenues and increasingly from the sale of information on prices. In this paper, we show that the efficiency of price discovery is, among other factors, determined by the fee charged by exchanges for price information.

With companies increasingly looking at targets abroad, the need to acquire specialised knowledge about the target, the target country's environment and the potential merits that may result from a given M&A deal is becoming ever more important. This research looks at the assistance long-term institutional shareholders could offer corporates in achieving their aims.

M&A deals are complex and challenging transactions that arguably represent the most significant investment a company can undertake, and give researchers an opportunity to analyse the value implications of these executive decisions. Whether mergers and acquisitions ultimately create or destroy corporate value and the identification of the factors that determine M&A success or failure are issues of crucial importance for both the management and shareholders of companies, and also for policy makers. The results presented in this paper provide some important conclusions regarding the impact of mergers and acquisitions in the UK, which should be taken into consideration by policymakers reviewing this area of the corporate environment.