Latest Research Blog Posts

Should product warnings contain signal words or qualifiers?

Researchers at Bangor Business School conducted two studies to address the question: Does the use of signal words and qualifiers influence how the message is perceived and its likelihood of engendering low-risk alcohol consumption

Publication date: 9 June 2021

Circular Business Models

Barack Obama’s biography was launched last month and serialised on the BBC.

Publication date: 12 February 2021

Assessing the Potential for a Local Land Value Tax in Wales

Publication date: 4 May 2020

Tax Havens: Public vs Private (unlisted) Firms’ Corporate Tax Avoidance

By Mahmoud Abdelkader, Danial Hemmings and Aziz Jaafar The use of tax havens to avoid taxes has come under increased public and political scrutiny, especially since the release of the Panama and Paradise papers – one of the biggest data leaks in history. These leaks revealed how large numbers of wealthy individuals and multinational companies (such as Apple, Nike and Facebook) use complex corporate structures to secretly transfer wealth to tax havens in order to reduce the overall amount of tax they pay.

Publication date: 11 February 2020

The rise of the SPAC – Should we be worried?

By Dr Danial Hemmings and Professor Aziz Jaafar Companies looking to list their shares on public stock exchanges used to have to conduct an Initial Public Offering (IPO) – not so now in the age of the ‘SPAC’. Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are listed shell companies, formed usually by private equity firms, who seek to use investors’ capital to acquire an unlisted company. The acquired company (i.e. the ‘target’) inherits the SPAC’s listed status without having to conduct an IPO. Crucially, the target company is undetermined at the time the SPAC is created – therefore investors will have no idea in which company they are eventually investing in! If they don’t agree with the proposed deal, however, they can as shareholders vote to reject it, and have their investment returned.

Publication date: 25 November 2019