Young Scholars Finance Consortium

Event Overview

The 9th Annual Young Scholars Finance Consortium, organized by Texas A&M University, will be held in person from March 20 – 22, 2025. The goal of this annual conference is to provide promising junior finance faculty and PhD students with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback from a select group of accomplished scholars.

We are honored to have Professor Viral Acharya, C.V. Starr Professor of Economics at New York University and former Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, as our keynote speaker. Several members of the external program committee have already committed to serving as discussants.

The conference theme alternates annually between corporate finance/financial intermediation and asset pricing/investments. The theme for 2025 is Corporate Finance/Financial Intermediation.

We invite advanced PhD 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. Non-presenting co-authors may be more senior.

Keynote Speaker

Viral Acharya
New York University

Viral V. Acharya is the C.V. Starr Professor of Economics in the Department of Finance at New York University Stern School of Business (NYU-Stern). He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Corporate Finance, a Research Affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and Research Associate of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). Viral was a Resident Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (Sep 2022-Jan 2023) and a Deputy Governor at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) during 23rd January 2017 to 23rd July 2019 in charge of Monetary Policy, Financial Markets, Financial Stability, and Research.

Viral’s primary research interest is in theoretical and empirical analysis of systemic risk of the financial sector, its regulation, and its genesis in government- and policy-induced distortions, an inquiry that also examines the interaction of credit and liquidity risks, their agency-theoretic foundations, and their general equilibrium consequences. In recent work, he has also explored the impact of pandemic and climate-changed related risks. Viral received the Alexandre Lamfalussy Senior Research Fellowship of the Bank for International Settlements in 2017, the inaugural Banque de France – Toulouse School of Economics Junior Prize in Monetary Economics and Finance in 2011, and the Senior Houblon-Normal Research Fellowship at the Bank of England in Summer 2008. He has been a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher, 2020-22, and his articles have won several best paper prizes at journals and conferences.

Viral is currently an editor of the Journal of Law, Finance and Accounting (2014-16, 2020-), a member of the Editorial Committee of the Annual Review of Financial Economics (2022-), and a Board member of the American Finance Association (2024-) and Financial Intermediation Research Society (2023-). He was earlier an editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation (2009-12), associate editor of the Journal of Finance (2011-14), and a Director of the Western Finance Association (2012-2015). He is presently a Scientific Advisor to the Sveriges Riksbank since February 2024, a member of the Climate-related Financial Risk Advisory Committee (CFRAC) of the Financial Stability Oversight Council for 2023-26, an invited member of the Bellagio Group of academics and policy-makers from central banks and finance ministries since 2021, and a member of the Financial Advisory Roundtable (FAR) of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since 2020. He is or has been an Academic Advisor to the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, New York and Philadelphia, and the Board of Governors, and has provided Academic Expert service to the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Viral completed Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai in 1995 and Ph.D. in Finance from NYU-Stern in 2001.

Keynote’s Website

External Program Committee

Sudheer Chava, Georgia Institute of Technology

Kim Cornaggia, Pennsylvania State University

Jess Cornaggia, Pennsylvania State University

Isil Erel, Ohio State University

Mark Flannery, University of Florida

Vyacheslav (Slava) Fos, Boston College

Paolo Fulghieri, University of North Carolina

Simon Gervais, Duke University

Itay Goldstein, University of Pennsylvania

Jarrad Harford, University of Washington

Zhiguo He, University of Chicago

Jerry Hoberg, University of Southern California

Josh Lerner, Harvard University

Karl Lins, University of Utah

Tim Loughran, Notre Dame University

Asaf Manela, Washington University in St. Louis

Vikram Nanda, University of Texas at Dallas

Christian Opp, University of Rochester

Amiyatosh Purnanandam, University of Michigan

Berk Sensoy, Vanderbilt University

Phil Strahan, Boston College

Tracy Wang, University of Minnesota

Wenyu Wang, Indiana University

Zhenyu Wang, Indiana University

James Weston, Rice University

Submissions

Paper submissions should be made via the submission portal. For each submission to be considered, a fee of $80 must be paid first via the payment portal. Please include the order number for your payment in the Google paper submission form.

The deadline for paper submission is November 18, 2024, at 11:59pm CT.

Papers authored solely by PhD students will be considered for the Best PhD Student Paper Award. The presenter of the awarded paper will be guaranteed a presentation slot and will receive up to $1000 in travel expenses.

Contact

Please contact the conference organizer, Christa Bouwman, at cbouwman@tamu.edu, if you have any questions or would like additional information about the conference.