3rd annual Young Scholars Finance Consortium highlights academic work

Providing 14 promising junior faculty members and advanced Ph.D. students from around the country the chance to showcase their academic work and receive constructive feedback from their peers as well as an elite group of 15 senior scholars brought in for the event, the Department of Finance at Mays Business School hosted the third annual Young Scholars Finance Consortium March 22-24. The first two consortiums were hosted at Mays’ CityCentre facility in Houston.

The consortium’s topic alternates each year among corporate finance / financial intermediation and asset pricing/investments. The 2018 Consortium focused on corporate finance and financial intermediation.

Activities at the three-day event at the George Hotel and Mays included a cocktail party, 1.5 days of presentation, a keynote address, and a networking dinner. Mays Executive Associate Dean Duane Ireland kicked off the event Friday morning. The keynote speaker was Peter M. DeMarzo, a chaired professor from Stanford University. From all of the Ph.D. student submissions, MIT student Daniel Green was the winner of the Best Ph.D. Student Paper Award.

Participants – many of whom had never been to College Station – said they were “impressed with our facilities, our faculty, the quality of the program, and how well it was organized,” said one of the organizers, Mays Associate Professor of Finance Christa Bouwman.

“Our event is truly unique,” Bouwman said of the rich opportunity for the Ph.D. students and junior faculty members to present and hear feedback from such renowned scholars in the audience.