The American Finance Association Annual Meetings have now come and gone (here is information on the broader conference). The conference was in sunny San Diego this year and I’m told it did not disappoint!(1) This 3-day conference collects the brightest minds in academia to discuss hundreds of new research papers — a gold mine for new and exciting ideas!
We always look at the mounds of papers presented to identify those that seem the most interesting (many of the papers on the program we cover on our blog or will cover them in the future).
Here were the top 5 papers that I personally found interesting:
- More Factors Are Needed: Evidence from a Simple Test: The current factor models simply don’t cut it. Researchers need to keep hunting for the holy grail!
- Prospect Theory and Stock Market Anomalies: Fama wanted a behavioral model that is testable. Well, these authors deliver…
- What Do Mutual Fund Investors Really Care About?: Investors are rational and care about their factor exposures, right? Uh…yeah right…they invest based on past returns and fund rankings.
- Factor Momentum and the Momentum Factor: Why bother chasing stock momentum…just trade factor momentum!(2)
- CEO Stress and Life Expectancy: The Role of Corporate Governance and Financial Distress: CEOs operating in stressful environments should probably ask for hazardous duty pay — because their job will likely kill them!
Honorable mention because the title is really cool and the topic is on the ETF market:
- Phantom of the Opera: ETFs and Shareholder Voting: A surprising unintended consequence of ETFs is that it may lead to poor corporate governance.
Feel free to let us know if there are papers from the conference that you find compelling!
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| ↑1 | I wasn’t able to attend this year, but this is the feedback we’ve received. |
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| ↑2 | closely related to this paper. |
About the Author: Wesley Gray, PhD
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