|
The Centre for Analytical Finance (CAF) at the Indian School of Business (ISB), hosted the Summer Research Conference 2008 in Finance during August 7 - 10, 2008. The conference started with a reception for the participants on the evening of August 7. Paper presentations and discussions took place on the following three days. The conference was held in the Academic Centre on the ISB campus in Hyderabad, India.
The theme of the conference was Recent Advances in Corporate Finance. As in the past years, finance researchers from across the world submitted papers to the conference. An international committee of experts selected fifteen papers from those submitted. The committee included Viral Acharya, Franklin Allen, Arnoud Boot, Glenn Boyle, Bhagwan Chowdhry, Stijn Claessens, Francesca Cornelli, Sudipto Dasgupta, Asli Demirguc-Kunt, Joseph Fan, Charles Hadlock, Thomas Hellmann, Kose John, Han Kim, Kai Li, Vojislav Maksimovic, Tom Noe, Terry Odean, NR Prabhala, Manju Puri, Subrata Sarkar, and Anjan Thakor.
The selected papers included theoretical as well as empirical papers. Papers with a focus on new ideas and concepts, or cutting-edge tools and techniques of analysis, figured prominently. Significantly, the conference included a full slate of papers on financial crisis, currently the most hotly debated finance topic. The selected papers were presented and discussed in five sessions:
- Institutional environment
- Corporate governance
- Credit decisions
- Investment decisions
- Financial crisis
Professor Michael Brennan (UCLA and CAF Academic Fellow 2008) delivered the keynote address at the conference. Apart from ISB faculty, the paper presenters and discussants at the conference included a roster of top researchers in corporate finance based in Asia, Europe, and North America, including three past Presidents of the American Finance Association: Franklin Allen (Wharton), Michael Brennan (UCLA), and Richard Roll (UCLA). There was a USD 5,000 award generously funded by Citigroup for the best paper presented at the conference. An award committee consisting of Michael Brennan (chair), Sumit Agarwal (member; Federal Reserve Bank Chicago and ISB) and Ram Thirumalai (member; ISB) gave the award to Benjamin Keys (Michigan), Tanmoy Mukherjee (Sorin Capital Management), Amit Seru (Chicago), and Vikrant Vig (London Business School) for their paper Did Securitization Lead to Lax Screening? Evidence From Subprime Loans 2001-2006
All participants though that it was a very high quality conference. The presentations and the discussions at the conference were lively, thought-provoking, and cutting-edge. Following the conference, Franklin Allen wrote to the conference organizers: “it has been a long time since I have been to a conference with such high quality”. |
