This study examines the seasoned equity issues of companies traded on the London Stock Exchange. Recent regulatory changes have allowed UK firms more discretion in choice of issue approach, and this has led many firms to issue through placing in preference to a rights issue. Having first documented the trend towards increasing use of placings, we go on to identify an interesting subset of placings that are less likely to be anticipated by the market, and find a significant positive market reaction to such placings, which contrasts with the significant negative reaction we find for issues by rights. We also examine the choice of seasoned equity issuance method, focusing on the choice between placings versus rights issues. We develop a model to explain the choice of equity issue method that achieves a high level of predictive accuracy.

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The literature on value impact of diversification decisions has focused on US firms and has examined "industrial" rather than "geographic diversification". This study exploits the Lang and Stulz (1994) , Berger and Ofek (1995) and Bodnar et al. (1999) methodologies and controls for "form of" diversification in assessing value impact for a sample of UK firms, for the period 1996-2000. Using an "adjusted value metric" that controls for industry effects, we report a significant and perverse geographic discount of 14%, and no systematic industrial value impact, suggesting that sector characteristics may be a significant driver of diversification choice for UK firms. Copyright 2006 The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.