The Department of Finance in the Faculty of Business and Economics is pleased to continue its annual conference series.
The Department of Finance in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne is pleased to continue its annual conference series: Finance Down Under: Building on the Best from the Cellars of Finance, which will take place in Melbourne, Australia, on 5-7 March, 2020.
OVERVIEW
We invite submissions that embody the best in current empirical and theoretical research. We welcome papers in asset pricing, corporate finance and all other areas of finance. The conference selection committee includes eminent scholars in every facet of finance. With the help of the selection committee, we strive to provide a conference program that is internationally renowned for excellent presentations, discussions, and keynote speeches. The academic sessions on the first day will be comprised of papers from all areas. In addition to these general sessions, a unique feature of the program is that, on the second day, we will have a special session where we honour 'vintage' research in finance that has inspired recent advances and withstood the test of time. In 2020, we will celebrate the body of work by professors Michael Brennan and Eduardo Schwartz. We are honoured to have Professor Brennan, Professor Schwartz, and Professor Michael Brandt as keynote speakers.
In addition to the academic sessions, participants are invited to a half-day tour of the local wine country following the Saturday morning session as well as a conference wine reception.
PROGRAM
You can view the event program here.
PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
The deadline for paper submissions has closed. Those accepted will be notified shortly.
For further questions, please contact our conference coordinator, Linda Lagos, at fdu-conference@unimelb.edu.au.
A limited contribution towards travel and accommodation costs will be provided for speakers and discussants
AWARDS
- Best Paper Award, with a prize of A$4,000.
- The CFAM-ARX Award. Jointly sponsored by the CFA Society of Melbourne (CFAM) and the Asia-Pacific Research Exchange of the CFA Institute (ARX), this award will be presented, with a prize of A$1,500, to a paper that has relevance to the Asia-Pacific region and/or to the asset management industry. To be considered for this award, authors need to select the option when submitting their papers.
We hope that you can join us in 2020.
FDU Organizing Committee
Federico Nardari, Qi Zeng, Garry Twite & Maurice McCourt
Department of Finance
Faculty of Business & Economics
The University of Melbourne
Registration for the 2020 conference is now open!
Register here
In order to register you must have a Conference Maker account, regardless of your attendance type.
You can use your existing Conference Maker account if you have one, or you can create one here.
Once logged in under your account, click the conference registration link in the main menu. You will be asked to choose one of the following attendance categories:
- Invited participant (presenter, discussant or session chair)
- Full time academic or industry professional
- Social attendee/guest
- PhD student (from the University of Melbourne)
- PhD student (from an external university)
- University of Melbourne faculty/staff
You will then be promoted to select what conference activities you would like to attend:
- Full conference attendance (including Thursday social and Saturday social)
- Conference attendance and Thursday social only (no Saturday social)
- Thursday social and Saturday social only (no conference attendance)
Pricing varies depending on your attendance category and choice of conference activities.
Registration category | Wine reception and opening keynote (Thursday) | Bus tour and gala dinner |
| University of Melbourne faculty/staff | AUD $0 | AUD $0 |
| Invited participant (presenter, discussant or session chair) | AUD $0 | AUD $0 |
| University of Melbourne PhD student | AUD $0 | Not eligible |
| PhD student from other universities | AUD $150 | Not eligible |
| Full time academic (not University of Melbourne) or industry professional | AUD $300 | AUD $150 |
| Social/guest attendee (not eligible for academic sessions) | AUD $150 | |
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I create an account through Conference Maker?
Firstly, ensure that you do not have an existing account. If you have submitted an academic paper for evaluation through the Conference Maker system, you may already have an account. You can check for any existing accounts here by entering your email address or UserID.
If you are a first time user, click here to be redirected to the sign up page. Fill out the required fields and submit the online form. Once an account has been created and you are logged in, you can proceed to register for the conference.
Can I change my attendance type?
Yes. Please email fdu-conference@unimelb.edu.au and we will alter your registration. There is no administration fee associated with this request, however you will be liable for any additional charges accrued as a result of changes to your attendance type and activity selection.
I can no longer attend the conference. Is there a cancellation fee?
An administration fee of $20 applies to all attendees who cancel their booking.
Why cant PhD students attend the bus tour and gala dinner on Saturday?
Our bus tour has very limited places and a large portion these seats are reserved for our international guests and speakers. PhD students from the University of Melbourne or other institutions can attend the wine reception and opening keynote on Thursday evening as an alternative.
Can I attend the social activities and not the academic lectures?
Yes. This will give you access to the Thursday wine reception and keynote address, as well as the Saturday bus tour down the Mornington Peninsular and dinner and Point Leo Estate. Social attendees are not permitted to attend the academic lectures on Friday and Saturday.
Will I receive a receipt after paying the registration fee?
A purchase receipt will be sent to the email address associated with the PayPal account used to pay the registration fee.
Where can I find the event schedule?
The official Finance Down Under 2020 schedule is available here.
For all additional questions regarding registration, contact fdu-conference@unimelb.edu.au.
Michael Brennan
Emeritus Professor, UCLA Anderson School of Management and London Business School
Michael Brennan is a professor of finance at both UCLA Anderson School of Management and London Business School. His research interests include asset pricing, corporate finance, the pricing and role of derivative securities, market microstructure and the role of information in capital markets. He has published extensively in all of these areas.
His current research concerns several topics, including: the problem of asset allocation when investors face time-varying opportunity sets; initial public offerings and the allocation of control rights in the corporation; the determinants of international flows of portfolio investment; the role of convertible securities in corporate finance; and corporate hedging strategies.
A former president of the American Finance Association, Brennan has served as editor of the Journal of Finance and was the founding editor of the Review of Financial Studies. He has consulted extensively for corporations in Canada and the U.S., and in 1995 he was awarded the INQUIRE Europe prize for his work on corporate hedging strategies.
Eduardo Schwartz
Distinguished Professor at UCLA and Ryan Beedie Chair in Finance at Simon Frasier University
Professor Eduardo Schwartz is a Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA and the Ryan Beedie Chair in Finance at Simon Frasier University..
Professor Schwartz is an expert in various dimensions of asset and securities pricing, and has at various times focused on pricing internet companies, interest rate models, asset allocation issues, evaluating natural resource investments, the stochastic behavior of commodity prices and valuing patent-protected R&D projects. His collected works include articles in finance and economic journals, two monographs and a large number of monograph chapters, conference proceedings and special reports.
He is among the first researchers to develop the real options method of pricing investments under uncertainty. He is co-editor, with Lenos Trigeorgis of the University of Cyprus, on the book Real Options and Investment Under Uncertainty (MIT, 2001), a compilation of recent papers and classic research in the field.
In 2015, Schwartz was named International Association for Quantitative Finance (IAQF)/SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year in recognition of his individual contributions to the advancement of quantitative finance.
Schwartz is the winner of a number of awards for both teaching excellence and the quality of his published work. He has served as associate editor for more than a dozen journals, including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He is a former president of the Western Finance Association and the American Finance Association. He is a fellow of the American Finance Association and the Financial Management Association International. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Michael W. Brandt
Kalman J. Cohen Professor of Business Administration at Fuqua School of Business
Michael W. Brandt is the Kalman J. Cohen Professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He is also a co-founder and Managing Principal of QMS Capital Management LP, a Durham North Carolina based quantitative asset management firm. Professor Brandt holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Chicago, a M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, and a M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics.
Professor Brandt conducts empirical and theoretical research in finance. His current work focuses on real-time processing of macroeconomic data by financial markets. He also works on quantitative portfolio management, risk management, currency and fixed income markets, and financial econometrics. Professor Brandt's research has appeared in leading academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Business, Journal or Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. He served as co-editor of the Review of Finance, the official journal of the European Finance Association, and as associate editor of the Journal of Finance, the official journal of the American Finance Association. He is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and serves on several advisory boards. Prior to joining Fuqua in 2003, Professor Brandt taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for six years.
| Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Heitor Almeida | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| George Aragon | Arizona State University |
| Ilona Babenko | Arizona State University |
| Francisco Barillas | UNSW |
| Pedro Barroso | UNSW |
| Sohnke Bartram | University of Warwick |
| Thomas Bates | Arizona State University |
| Robert Battalio | Notre Dame |
| Heidi Benamar | Federal Reserve |
| Henk Berkman | University of Auckland |
| Gennaro Bernile | University of Miami |
| Oliver Boguth | Arizona State University |
| Audra Boone | Texas Christian University |
| Jonathan Brogaard | University of Utah |
| Stephen Brown | Monash Business School |
| Max Bruche | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin |
| Sabrina Buti | Université Paris-Dauphine |
| Jie Cao | Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| Indraneel Chakraborty | University of Miami |
| Gilles Chemla | Imperial College Business School, CNRS, and CEPR |
| Mikhail Chernov | UCLA Anderson |
| Tarun Chordia | Emory University |
| Oleg Chuprinin | UNSW |
| Jonathan Cohn | University of Texas at Austin |
| Riccardo Colacito | UNC Chapel Hill |
| Carole Comerton-Forde | UNSW |
| Jennifer Conrad | UNC Kengan-Flagler Business School |
| Kristle Cortes | UNSW |
| Zhi Da | Notre Dame |
| Sudipto Dasgupta | Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| Abe De Jong | Monash University |
| Stephen Dimmock | Nanyang Technological University |
| Hitesh Doshi | University of Houston |
| Ran Duchin | University of Washington |
| Andrew Ellul | Indiana University |
| Robert Faff | University of Queensland |
| Joseph PH Fan | Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| Eliezer Fich | Drexel University |
| Thierry Foucault | HEC Paris |
| Cesare Fracassi | University of Texas at Austin |
| Fangjian Fu | Singapore Management University |
| Mike Gallmeyer | University of Virginia |
| Neal Galpin | Monash University |
| Federico Gavazzoni | INSEAD |
| Simon Gervais | Duke University |
| Ron Giammarino | University of British Columbia |
| Michael Gofman | University of Rochester |
| Luis Goncalves-Pinto | UNSW |
| Todd Gormley | University of Washington St. Louis |
| Vidhan Goyal | Hong Kong University of Science and Technology |
| Allaudeen Hameed | National University of Singapore |
| Jarrad Harford | University of Washington |
| Nikolaus Hautsch | University of Vienna |
| Christian Heyerdahl-Larsen | Indiana University |
| Edith Hotchkiss | Boston College |
| David Hsieh | Duke University |
| Eric Hughson | Claremont McKenna College |
| Zoran Ivkovich | Michigan State University |
| Kris Jacobs | University of Houston |
| Shane Johnson | Texas A&M University |
| Travis Johnson | University of Texas Austin |
| Christopher Jones | University of Southern California Marshall |
| Dalida Kadyrzhanova | Georgia State University |
| Robert Korajczyk | Northwestern University |
| Nitin Kumar | Indian School of Business |
| Laurence Lescourret | ESSEC Business School |
| David Lesmond | Tulane University |
| Marcin Kacperczyk | Imperial College London |
| Kai Li | Macquarie University |
| Karl Lins | University of Utah |
| Hong Liu | Washington University in St Louis |
| Dmitry Livdan | University of California Berkeley |
| Richard Lowery | University of Texas Austin |
| Christian Lundblad | University of North Carolina Chapel Hill |
| Peter MacKay | Hong Kong University of Science and Technology |
| Andrew MacKinlay | Virginia Tech |
| Christoph Merkle | Kühne Logistics University |
| Alex Michaelides | Imperial College Business School |
| Sophie Moinas | Toulouse School of Economics |
| Lyndon Moore | Monash University |
| Pamela Moulton | Cornell University |
| Kjell Nyborg | University of Zurich |
| Micah Officer | Loyola Marymount University |
| Bradley Paye | Virginia Tech |
| Neil Pearson | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Kim Peijnenburg | EDHEC Business School |
| Ludovic Phalippou | Oxford |
| Peter Pham | UNSW |
| Meijun Qian | Australian National University |
| Yiming Qian | University of Conneticut |
| Uday Rajan | University of Michigan |
| Oleg Rytchkov | Temple University |
| Stefano Saccetto | IESE Business School |
| Shrihari Santosh | University of Colorado Boulder |
| Norman Schuerhoff | Swiss Finance Institute at University of Lausanne |
| Ivan Shaliastovich | University of Wisconsin Madison |
| Jianfeng Shen | UNSW |
| Clemens Silam | University of Texas Austin |
| Stephan Siegel | University of Washington |
| Rui Silva | London Business School |
| Denis Sosyura | Arizona State University |
| Johan Sulaeman | National University of Singapore Business School |
| Yuri Tserlukevich | Arizona State University |
| Rossen Valkanov | University of California San Diego |
| Chris Veld | Monash University |
| Patrick Verwijmeren | Erasmus University, University of Melbourne |
| Mitch Warachka | Chapman University |
| Michael Weber | University of Chicago |
| Chishen Wei | Singapore Management University |
| Joakim Westerholm | University of Sydney |
| Youchang Wu | University of Oregon |
| David Yermack | New York University |
| Vijay Verramili | University of Houston |
| Bart Yueshen | INSEAD |
| Stefan Zeume | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Min Zhu | University of Queensland |
Finance Down Under, 7-9 March 2019
Finance Down Under, 1-3 March 2018
Finance Down Under, 2-4 March 2017
Finance Down Under, 3-5 March 2016
Finance Down Under, 5-7 March 2015
Finance Down Under, 6-8 March 2014
Finance Down Under, 7-9 March 2013
Finance Down Under, 15-17 March 2012
Finance Down Under, 11-12 March 2011
Third Annual Society for Financial Economics (Asia) Conference, 16-18 June 2010
Finance Down Under, 25 March 2010
Finance Down Under, 7 April 2009
Melbourne Derivatives Research Group Conference, 19 March 2008
Correlations and Copulas - Risk Management Conference, 21 September 2007
NYU Down Under Derivatives Conference, 29 March 2007
2020 Award Winners
Best Paper Award (AUD 4,000)
The Origins and Real Effects of the Gender Gap: Evidence from CEOs’ Formative Years
Ran Duchin, University of Washington
Mikhail Simutin, University of Toronto
Denis Sosyura, Arizona State University
ARX/CFAM Award Winner (AUD 1,500)
Eye in the sky: private satellites and government macro data
Abhiroop Mukherjee, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
George Panayotov, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Janghoon Shon, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology