Young Scholars Finance Consortium

Event Overview

The 10th annual Young Scholars Finance Consortium, organized by the Adam C. Sinn ’00 Department of Finance at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School, will be held in College Station, Texas, from March 19 to March 21, 2026. The goal of this annual conference is to provide promising junior finance faculty and doctoral students with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback from a select group of accomplished scholars.

We are pleased to have Professor Lauren H. Cohen, the L.E. Simmons Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, as our keynote speaker.

The conference theme alternates annually between asset pricing/investments and corporate finance/financial intermediation. The theme for 2026 is asset pricing/investments.

We invite advanced Ph.D. students and untenured faculty, who received their first full-time faculty appointment within the last eight years, to submit both theoretical and empirical papers to the conference.

Submissions may include senior co-authors, though only Ph.D. students and eligible junior faculty are eligible to present.

Keynote Speaker

Lauren H. Cohen
Harvard Business School

Lauren Cohen is the L.E. Simmons Professor in the Finance & Entrepreneurial Management Units at Harvard Business School and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is an Editor of the Review of Financial Studies, along with being a past Editor of Management Science, and serving on the editorial board of the Review of Asset Pricing Studies.

Professor Cohen teaches in the MBA Program, Executive Education Program, Doctoral Program, and Special Custom Programs at the Harvard Business School, teaching across Family Enterprise, Investment Management, and Innovation Course Offerings. In particular, he is the Faculty Co-Chair and Designer of the HBS Executive Education course ‘Building a Legacy: Family Office Wealth Management,’ designer of a first-of-its-kind MBA Course in Family Offices entitled ‘How to Not Bankrupt Your Family,’ and Faculty Co-Chair and Designer of the HarvardX Fintech course.

He is an award-winning researcher, and best-selling case writer, with works published in the top journals in Finance and Economics. His work is frequently profiled in various media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, and Forbes. It has also been recognized by numerous National Science Foundation (NSF) Awards, including a National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his research agenda on Relationships in Finance. He was named a 2008 Pensions & Investments “Cutting Edge Academic,” a Top 40 Under 40 Business School Professor in 2017 by Poets & Quants, and a top teacher at Harvard by CNBC.

Dr. Cohen frequently advises government organizations in the US and abroad, including the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, United States Patent & Trademark Office, testifying before the United States Congress, and advising governments, central banks, inter-governmental organizations, and sovereign ruling families throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia on matters of Innovation Policy, Impact Investing, Climate Change, Pension Structure, and Family Office Management.

Through his applied work, Dr. Cohen has consulted with top hedge funds in the industry, and has been awarded numerous practitioner research prizes. He has also appeared as an expert witness in high profile innovation-, insider trading-, and investment-related litigation cases, including those involving the largest global asset management and operating firms.

Dr. Cohen received a PhD in finance and an MBA from the University of Chicago in 2005. He earned dual undergraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania – a BSE from the Wharton School and a BA in economics from the College of Arts & Sciences in 2001. He has also served on the Advisory Boards of Oppenheimer Funds (acquired by Invesco Investment Management Ltd.), Cake Financial (acquired by E*Trade) and Quadriserv, Inc. (acquired by EquiLend Holdings – an industry consortium comprised of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Bank of America, UBS, JPMorgan, Northern Trust, Blackrock and State Street).

Professor Cohen currently resides in Belmont, MA with his wife – Dr. Nicole Cohen – and their six children. In his spare time, Professor Cohen is a competitive powerlifter.

Keynote’s Website

External Program Committee

Vikas Agarwal, Georgia State University

Hengjie Ai, University of Wisconsin-Madison

George Aragon, Arizona State University

Kerry Back, Rice University

Turan Bali, Georgetown University

Frederico Belo,INSEAD

Gregory Brown, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Hui Chen, MIT

William Cong, Cornell University

Anthony Cookson, University of Colorado at Boulder

Zhi Da, University of Notre Dame

Winston Dou, University of Pennsylvania

Richard Evans, University of Virginia

Lorenzo Garlappi, University of British Columbia

Amit Goyal, University of Lausanne

Umit Gurun, University of Texas at Dallas

Bing Han, University of Toronto

Zhiguo He, Stanford University

Burton Hollifield, Carnegie Mellon University

Marcin Kacperczyk, Imperial College London

Ron Kaniel, University of Rochester

Ralph Koijen, University of Chicago

Albert “Pete” Kyle, University of Maryland

Xiaoji Lin, University of Minnesota

Dong Lou, HKUST

Asaf Manela, Washington University in St. Louis

David McLean, Georgetown University

Stefan Nagel, University of Chicago

Stavros Panageas, University of California, Los Angeles

Neil Pearson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Jeffrey Pontiff, Boston College

Veronika Pool, Vanderbilt University

Alberto Rossi, Georgetown University

Ronnie Sadka, Boston College

Lukas Schmid, University of Southern California

Clemens Sialm, University of Texas at Austin

Laura Starks, University of Texas at Austin

Andrea Vedolin, Boston University

Kumar Venkataraman, Southern Methodist University

Adrien Verdelhan, MIT

Russ Wermers, University of Maryland

Jeffrey Wurgler, New York University

Liyan Yang, University of Toronto

Mao Ye, Cornell University

Harold Zhang, University of Texas at Dallas

Guofu Zhou, Washington University in St. Louis

Submissions

To submit your paper, first pay the submission fee on the payment portal. The regular submission fee is $100. For papers authored solely by Ph.D. students, the submission fee is $50. Then submit your paper to the submission portal. Please include the order number from the submission fee receipt when you submit your paper.

The deadline for paper submission is November 18, 2025, at 11:59 p.m. CST.

Best Ph.D. Student Paper Award Papers authored solely by Ph.D. students will be considered for the Best Ph.D. Student Paper Award, sponsored by the Adam C. Sinn ’00 Center for Investment Management. The presenter of the awarded paper will be guaranteed a presentation slot and will receive up to $2,500 in travel expenses.

Contact

Please contact the conference organizers: Yong Chen (ychen@mays.tamu.edu), Lorena Keller, (lkeller@mays.tamu.edu), or Davide Tomio (tomio@mays.tamu.edu) if you have any questions or would like additional information about the conference.