The Department of Finance in the Faculty of Business and Economics is pleased to continue its annual conference series.
Each year, we honour 'vintage' work in finance that has inspired recent advances and withstood the test of time.
Organisation for the 2020 Finance Down Under is currently underway and more information will be available shortly.
FDU Organizing Committee
Federico Nardari, Qi Zeng, Garry Twite & Maurice McCourt
Department of Finance
Faculty of Business & Economics
The University of Melbourne
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
| Name | Institution |
| Tim Adam | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin |
| Reena Aggarwal | Georgetown University |
| Anup Agrawal | University of Alabama |
| George Aragon | Arizona State University |
| Kerry Back | Rice University |
| Sohnke Bartram | University of Warwick |
| Thomas Bates | Arizona State University |
| Robert Battalio | University of Notre Dame |
| Henk Berkman | The University of Auckland |
| Antje Berndt | Australian National University |
| Gennaro Bernile | Singapore Management University |
| Utpal Bhattacharya | Hong Kong University of Science and Technology |
| Oliver Boguth | Arizona State University |
| Audra Boone | Texas Christian University |
| Bradyn Breon-Drish | University of California San Diego |
| Jonathan Brogaard | University of Washington |
| Stephen Brown | New York University |
| Max Bruche | Cass Business School |
| Sabrina Buti | Dauphine University |
| Indraneel Chakraborty | University of Miami |
| Gilles Chemla | Imperial College |
| Tarun Chordia | Emory University |
| Ric Colacito | UNC |
| Zhi Da | University of Notre Dame |
| Stephen Dimmock | Nanyang Technological University |
| Ran Duchin | University of Washington |
| Espen Eckbo | Dartmouth College |
| Roger Edelen | University of California Davis |
| Andrew Ellul | Indiana University |
| Joseph Fan | CUHK |
| Eliezer Fich | Drexel University |
| Thierry Foucault | HEC, Paris |
| Fangjian Fu | Singapore Management University |
| Michael Gallmeyer | University of Virginia |
| Federico Gavazzoni | INSEAD |
| Simon Gervais | Duke University |
| Ron Giammarino | University of British Columbia |
| Luis Filipe Goncalves-Pinto | Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| Todd Gormley | Washington University in St Louis |
| Vidhan Goyal | Hong Kong University of Science and Technology |
| Johh Griffin | UT Austin |
| Mark Grinblatt | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Sebastian Gryglewicz | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| Bing Han | University of Toronto |
| Jarrad Harford | University of Washington |
| Samuel Hartzmark | University of Chicago |
| Nikolaus Hautsch | University of Vienna |
| Christian Heyerdahl-Larsen | London Business School |
| Burton Hollifield | Carnegie Mellon University |
| David Hsieh | Duke University |
| Eric Hughson | Claremont McKenna College |
| Philipp Illeditsch | University of Pennsylvania |
| Zoran Ivkovich | Michigan State University |
| Kris Jacobs | University of Houston |
| Shane Johnson | Texas A&M University |
| Travis Johnson | UT Austin |
| Jennifer Juergens | U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission |
| Marcin Kacperczyk | Imperial College London |
| Raymond Kan | University of Toronto |
| Robert Korajczyk | Northwestern University |
| Nitin Kumar | Indian School of Business |
| Howard Kung | London Business School |
| Laurence Lescourret | ESSEC Business School |
| Karl Lins | University of Utah |
| Laura Xiaolei Liu | Peking University |
| Dmitry Livdan | University of California, Berkeley |
| Michelle Lowry | Drexel University |
| Peter Mackay | Hong Kong University of Science and Technology |
| Andrew MacKinlay | Virginia Tech |
| Igor Makarov | London School of Economics |
| Ron Masulis | UNSW |
| Christoph Merkle | Khne Logistics University |
| Alexander Michaelides | Imperial College |
| Roni Michaely | Cornell University |
| Sophie Moinas | University of Toulouse |
| Vikram Nanda | University of Texas |
| Phong Ngo | Australian National University |
| Maureen OHara | Cornell University |
| Micah Officer | Loyola Marymount University |
| Neil Pearson | University of Illinois |
| Kim Peijnenburg | HEC, Paris |
| Ludovic Phalippou | Oxford University |
| Peter Pham | UNSW |
| Jeffrey Pontiff | Boston College |
| Uday Rajan | University of Michigan |
| David Reeb | National University of Singapore |
| David Robinson | Duke University |
| Harley Ryan Jr | Georgia State University |
| Oleg Rytchkov | Temple University |
| Stefano Sacchetto | University of Navarra |
| Jacob Sagi | UNC |
| Batchimeg Sambalaibat | Indiana University |
| Shrihari Santosh | University of Maryland |
| Lucio Sarno | Cass Business School |
| Norman Schürhoff | Université de Lausanne |
| Rick Sen | UNSW |
| Ivan Shaliastovich | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Jianfeng Shen | University of New South Wales |
| Clemens Sialm | University of Texas |
| Stephan Siegel | University of Washington |
| Rui Silva | London Business School |
| Tom Smith | University of Queensland |
| Denis Sosyura | Arizona State University |
| Johan Sulaeman | National University of Singapore |
| Yuri Tserlukevich | Arizona State University |
| Patrick Verwijmeren | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| Mitch Warachka | University of San Diego |
| Michael Weber | University of Chicago |
| Chishen Wei | Singapore Management University |
| Mindy Xiaolan | UT Austin |
| David Yermack | New York University |
| Bart Yueshen | INSEAD |
| Stefan Zeume | University of Michigan |
| Edith Hotchkiss | Boston College |
Laura Starks
Charles E. & Sarah M. Seay Regents’ Chair in Finance
Co-Executive Director, Social Innovation Initiative@McCombs
Laura T. Starks, Charles E. and Sarah M. Seay Regents Chair in Finance and co-Executive Director of Social Innovation@McCombs. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on environmental, social and governance investing, global financial strategies, and other finance topics. She has previously served as interim Dean, Associate Dean for Research, Chairman of the Department of Finance and Graduate Advisor. She was also an editor of the Review of Financial Studies from 2008-2014 and has won a number of research and teaching awards in her career. Her current research focuses on mutual funds, corporate governance institutional investors and environmental, social and governance investing. She has served on the Boards of Directors of the four national academic finance organizations: the American Finance Association, the Financial Management Association (FMA), the Society of Financial Studies (SFS) and the Western Finance Association (WFA). She is past president of the FMA and WFA and is currently President of the SFS. She is a past Chairman of the Graduate Assembly for the University of Texas at Austin, the elected faculty council that governs the University’s graduate programs, and served on the Executive Committee of the University Faculty Council. She is an independent director for CREF Retirement Accounts and TIAA-CREF Mutual Funds, serves on the Investment Advisory Committee for the Employees Retirement System of Texas, the Board of Governors of the Investment Company Institute, and the Governing Council of the Independent Directors Council. She has also served on the 2013 Strategy Council and the 2014 Expert Panel for the Norwegian Government Pension Fund (the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world).
Russ Wermers
Bank of America Professor of Finance & Director, Center for Financial Policy
Russ Wermers is Bank of America Professor of Finance and Director, Center for Financial Policy at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland at College Park, where he won a campus-wide teaching award during 2005 and a Krowe Teaching Award (within the Smith Business School) during 2013. His main research interests include studies of the efficiency of securities markets, as well as the role of institutional investors in setting stock prices. In addition, he studies and teaches quantitative equity strategies, and is currently researching microfinance institutions in Thailand. Most notably, his past research has developed new approaches to measuring and attributing the performance of mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds, as well as devising winning strategies for investing in these funds. Professor Wermers also studies the investment behavior of these asset managers, as well as the impact of their trades on stock markets. His papers have been published in leading scholarly journals, such as The American Economic Review, The Review of Financial Studies, The Journal of Financial Economics, and The Journal of Finance. His article on mutual fund “herding” and stock prices (Journal of Finance, 1999) won the NYSE Award for the Best Paper on Equity Trading in 1995. His coauthored article on mutual fund performance was a finalist for the Smith-Breeden Award for the Best Paper in the Journal of Finance during 2006/2007. Professor Wermers consults for the hedge fund, pension fund, and mutual fund industries. He is coauthor of a book on the latest scientific approaches to performance evaluation and attribution of professional fund managers, written for academics and practitioners (published in December 2012). He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in December 1995.
Jules van Binsbergen
The Nippon Life Professor in Finance, Professor of Finance
Jules van Binsbergen conducts theoretical and empirical research in finance. His current work focuses on asset pricing, in particular the relationship between financial markets and the macro economy, and the organization, skill and performance of financial intermediaries. Some of his recent research focuses on the influence of financial market anomalies on real economic activity, measuring the skill of mutual fund managers and the term structure of cash flow growth and stock return predictability. Professor van Binsbergen’s research has appeared in leading academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Monetary Economics. He received his PhD from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. After obtaining his PhD in 2008, he joined the faculty at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he got tenure in 2014. He joined the Wharton School in 2014.
2018 Award Winners
2018 Best Paper Award (AUD 4,000)
Well Begun is Half Done: Initial R&D Competence and Firm Growth
Kyungran Lee, S. Katie Moon and Seungjoon Oh
2018 Best Asia Pacific Paper (AUD 1,500)
Social Stability and the Resource Allocation within Business Groups
Haikun Zhu
View photos from our previous events.