João Paulo Vieito is Professor of Finance, and Director of the School of Business Studies at Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo, Portugal. He received his Ph.D in Business Science,  Finance Specialization, from the Faculty of Economics and Management, University of Porto.  He also as a MSc in Finance from Portuguese Catholic University, a MBA in Operations Management from Portuguese Catholic University and a degree in Management from ISCTE.

His research interests, on which he has published several papers in finance and economics journals, are in neurofiance corporate governance and market efficiency. He has been on the editorial board of journals like Annals of Financial Economics, Journal of Modern Accounting and Auditing, Montenegro Economic Journal and Mudra Journal of Finance and Accounting.  He published in journals like Corporate Governance an International Review, Journal of Behaviorial Finance, Applied Economic Letters, International Review of Econmic and Finance,  Journal of Economic and Business,  Journal of Economic and Finance, Quarterly Journal of Finance and Economics, among several others.

He is a Program Director of the Pos-Graduation in Finance and Banking at ESCE-IPVC. He has taught extensively in various MSc and MBAs. He was also presenter, chairman and discussant in numerous sessions in international, national and regional associations' meetings and symposia. Prof. Vieito is also member of Western Finance Association, Financial Management Association, Midwest Finance Association, Southern Finance Association and Eastern Finance Associations.

Allaudeen Hameed, Provost`s Chair Professor of Finance at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School.

Professor Hameed`s research interests include return-based trading strategies, stock return co-movement, liquidity, role of financial analysts and international financial markets. His research work has been published in leading finance journals such as The Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and Review of Financial Studies. He is an Editor at the International Review of Finance and serves on editorial boards of the Financial Management, and Pacific-Basin Finance Journal.

Professor Hameed has won numerous awards including the Outstanding Researcher Award at NUS (2015), the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Alumni Merit Award (2011), and Best Paper Awards at the FMA European Conference (2016), Swiss Society for Financial Market Research Conference (2014) and the China International Finance Conference (2008). He has delivered keynote addresses at international finance conferences.

Professor Hameed has also held visiting professor appointments at Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Texas at Austin and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Professor of the Faculty of Economics, Administration and Accounting from the University of Sao Paulo (FEA / USP), Major of Finance, of the FEA / USP, São Paulo, Brazil. Director of the Fundação Instituto de Administração, since June 8th 2000, an institution associated with the Faculty of Economics, Administration and Accounting from the University of Sao Paulo. Coordinator of the Management Training Course and of the MBA on Enterprise Management of the Fundação Instituto de Administração and the Faculty of Economics, Administration and Accounting of the University of São Paulo.Ex-Director of the ABA ? Anhembi´s Beneficiary Association. Member of the IBEF´s Board - Brazilian Institute of Finance Executives. Major accomplishments: Structured the Financial Board of Directors of the Sao Paulo´s Water and Electricity Department - DAEE, introducing various control systems of civil works and services, as well as its Systems of Planning and Financial Control, Accounting and Finance. Collaborated in the structuring of the BANESPA´s (the Bank of the State of São Paulo) Inspection and Analysis Department. Structured and was the first Executive Secretary of the Executive Secretariat of the Guidance Council of the São Paulo´s Fund of Water Resources.

Anjan´s research, teaching, book writing and speaking engagements have focused on a wide range of topics: banking, corporate finance, corporate governance, innovation and growth. He is the fourth most published scholar in Finance in the past 50 years and his work has appeared in most of the leading journals in Finance and Economics.

In addition to his many published articles, monographs, and book chapters, Anjan has written numerous books: The Value Sphere: Secrets of Creating and Retaining Shareholder Wealth (VIA Press, 1999), Contemporary Financial Intermediation (Dryden Press, 1994), Becoming a Better Value Creator: How to Improve Your Company`s Bottom Line?And Your Own (June, 2000), and Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations (Edward Elger Publishing, 2006). His latest book is The Four Colors of Business Growth (Academic Press, 2011). He has served as managing editor of Journal of Financial Intermediation and serves as associate editor of Journal of Banking and Finance.

Bhagwan Chowdhry is a Professor of Finance, and Faculty Director, Master of Financial Engineering program, at UCLA Anderson where he has held an appointment since 1988.

Professor Chowdhry has also taught at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Indian School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in 1989 from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He also has an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Iowa and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology.

His research interests, on which he has published several papers in finance and economics journals, are in International Finance and Corporate Finance and Strategy. He has been on the editorial board of a number of finance journals. He teaches International Finance, Corporate Finance and Financial Institutions at Anderson. He has also organized and taught Executive Education programs on Financial Derivatives, Corporate Risk Management and Valuation in Los Angeles, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Hyderabad.

Microfinance has been his recent teaching, research and applied interest. He has supervised several MBA student projects in Microfinance in the last several years and has taught an undergraduate seminar class and an MBA elective on the subject. He has developed a new model for "Franchising Microfinance" on which he has written a research paper and is studying the feasibility of implementing the model with a Microfinance Institution. Professor Chowdhry has recently proposed a Financial Access at Birth (FAB) Campaign in which every child born in the world is given an initial deposit of $100 in an online bank account to guarantee that everyone in the world will have access to financial services in a few decades. You can read about the campaign at http://bit.ly/bFAB.

Education: Ph.D. Graduate School of Business 1989, University of Chicago; MBA Economics, Graduate School of Business 1989, University of Chicago; MBA Finance, 1983, University of Iowa; B.Tech. Mechanical Engineering, 1981, Indian Institute of Technology, India.

Master of Arts and Ph.D. in Business Administration (major in Finance) at The University of Georgia. Currently, Dean School of Business Administration, Universidad Autónoma de Chile. He also was Dean at the School of Business at Universidad Santo Tomás (Santiago, Chile). In the past he worked at the School of Business and Economics, Universidad de Chile, having the following positions; Vice Dean, Chairman of the Department of Management and Dean of the Graduate School. Visiting Professor at: The University of Georgia (USA) and Escola Superior de Ciencias Empresariais, Insituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo (Portugal).Visiting Scholar at Waseda University (Tokio, Japan) and Tulane University (USA). Author of more than 35 papers, some of them published in very prestigious journals such as: Journal of Financial Economics, Financial Management, Emerging Markets Review, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance and Applied Economics (UK). Author of three books in the area of Corporate Finance. Consultant of firms, regulators and international organizations: ATELMO, BanEdwards, Bancrédito, Bolsa de Comercio de Santiago, Compañía de Teléfonos de Chile, CTC Mundo, CODENSA (Colombia), Copec, EDELNOR (Perú), Enami, ENAP, Endesa Latinomérica (España), Entel Chile, FIDE CMB Prime, FIDE Orión, FIDE Llaima, FIDE Santander Crucero, FIDE Sabco, Fondo de Inversión Santiago Advent, FIDE Toronto, Fundación Bolivia Exporta (Bolivia),IDB (USA), Metrogas, Scotiabank S.A., Superintendencia de Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones and Superintendencia de Valores y Seguros.

Carlos Pombo is associate professor in economics and finance at the School of Management at Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, Colombia). He holds a PhD and MS in Economics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MA in Economics from Universidad de los Andes and BA degree in Economics from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota, Colombia). His main research areas are corporate finance and governance, economics of regulation and industrial organization. He has publications in the following indexed-journals: Journal of Economics and Business, Energy Economics, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, and the International Review of Applied Economics. He has been contributed author in the following collective publications from the Inter-American Development Bank -Latin American Research Network: (i) Privatization in Latin America: Myth and Reality (Stanford University Press) and ii) Investor Protection and Corporate Governance: firm level evidence across Latin America, (Stanford University Press). He has been visiting researcher at Institut d?Economie Industrielle (IDEI) ? Université des Sciences Sociales (Toulouse); and visiting professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). He also has done consulting work for the Inter-American Development Bank, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the Coporación Andina de Fomento (CAF).

Christian Wolff is Director of the Luxembourg School of Finance and Professor of Finance at the University of Luxembourg, as well as a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London. He holds economics degrees from Erasmus University Rotterdam, and received his MBA and PhD degrees in International Finance from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. Professor Wolff was previously employed at London Business School and Maastricht University and held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago and The National University of Singapore, and INSEAD. Professor Wolff has published in leading academic journals, such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Business, the Journal of Banking and Finance, and Management Science. He has taught extensively in various MBA and executive programs. Professor Wolff has served as consultant to many financial institutions and corporations. He is a Program Director at the Amsterdam Institute of Finance, in the Netherlands, and a Nonexecutive Director at Dominion Investment Analytics S.A. in Lugano, Switzerland. He is Founding Editor of the Journal of Empirical Finance.

Christopher Polk is Professor of Finance and the Director of the Financial Markets Group at the London School of Economics. Professor Polk has also taught at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and Harvard University´s Department of Economics. He holds a Ph.D in Finance from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and a B.S. in Physics and Economics from Duke University. Professor Polk is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, an advisor to the EU European Securities and Markets Authority, a consultant to the Bank of England, and an associate editor of the Journal of Finance. He has published extensively in leading finance and economics journals and is an expert on the behavior of security prices and investment strategies.

Invesco Professor of Financial History.

Founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Endowment Asset Management (CEAM). Fellow of Clare College. BA (University of Oxford), MSc (London Business School), MSc and PhD (London School of Economics). My research interests include financial history and asset management, in particular, long horizon investing.  David Chambers published in the top journals in finance and economic history and my research has been widely covered by the media. David Chambers particularly known for my research on the investing of John Maynard Keynes. I am a member of the Finance subject group at Cambridge Judge Business School, which focuses on the investment and financial decisions of firms and financial institutions, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

Dr. David Ding is Associate Professor of Finance (Education) and Director of the CFA University Affiliation Program (since 2015) at the Singapore Management University. He was the Director of the Master of Applied Finance (China) program from 2007 to 2010. Prior to SMU, he was the Foundation Professor of Finance and coordinator of the Finance program at the University of New South Wales (Asia). David?s other academic experience includes appointments as Professor of Finance/Financial Economics at Massey University (New Zealand), Associate Head of the School of Economics and Finance at Massey University, Director of the Center for Research in Financial Services and Head of the Division of Banking and Finance at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Professor Ding has taught Business Finance, Financial Management, Corporate Finance, Investment Analysis & Portfolio Management, and International Financial Management at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Professor Ding?s areas of research are in the microstructure of financial markets, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, international corporate finance, and investments. He has published more than 60 articles in leading academic and practitioner journals such as the Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Empirical Finance, Journal of Futures Markets, International Review of Financial Analysis, Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Journal of Multinational Financial Management, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, Financial Review, Pacific Basin Finance Journal, International Journal of Finance, International Review of Economics and Finance, and Asian Development Review, among others. In 2009, he was listed among the top 3% of the most prolific authors appearing in the 26 core finance journals; in 2005, he was ranked 17th out of 778 researchers from among 170 universities in the Asia-Pacific region by the Pacific Basin Finance Journal. Before joining academia, David worked professionally in commercial banking, management consulting, and production control. His professional service includes appointments as the elected president of the Asian Finance Association, president of the Pacific Basin Financial Management Society, panel of experts on securities offences at the Commercial Affairs Department of the Singapore Police Force, and advisory board member of the journal of the Singapore Exchange, PULSES. He is a member of the American Finance Association, Financial Management Association International, Asian Finance Association, CFA Institute, CFA New Zealand, and the Asian Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee. In 2011, he was honored as a Fellow of CPA Australia. He is editor of the Pacific Accounting Review, regional editor of the Journal of Emerging Markets, and serves on the editorial board of International Review of Financial Analysis, Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies, Corporate Governance and Sustainability Review, International Journal of Banking and Finance, among others. Dr. Ding holds the Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Memphis, an MBA in Finance from the University of Tennessee, and an Honours degree in Business Administration from the University of Windsor, Canada. 

Douglas T. Breeden is  William W. Priest Professor of Finance and former Dean (2001-2007) of Duke University Fuqua School of Business. He has previously served on faculties at the University of Chicago, Stanford, and North Carolina (where he was the Dalton McMichael Professor of Finance). Breeden has published well-cited research on consumption and intertemporal asset pricing, as well as on mortgage securities and hedging. His 1979 article on intertemporal portfolio theory and consumption-based asset pricing was one of the Top 10 most-cited articles in the Journal of Financial Economics in two decades. He was the Distinguished Speaker at the Western Finance Association Annual Meeting in 2005, speaking on Consumption-based Asset Pricing After 25 Years. His current research is on  Stocks, Bonds, Consumers Leading Indicator. He is the Founding Editor and was Editor for 10 years of The Journal of Fixed Income and was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Finance Association. He has served as Associate Editor of The Journal of Finance, The Review of Financial Studies, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, The Journal of Financial Economics and The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. He was elected a Fellow of the American Finance Association in January, 2010. He holds a Ph.D. in Finance from Stanford and an S.B. from M.I.T. He serves as a member of the MIT Corporations Visiting Committee for the Sloan School of Management and was a member of Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council. He also served on the Board of Goethe Business School in Frankfurt, Germany and was an Honorary Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. He is the Co-founder and was Chairman from 1982-2005 of Smith Breeden Associates, a money management firm, as well as Chairman and principal owner of Community First Financial Group, a bank holding company. He is active in philanthropic endeavours and in community development in his birthplace in Southern Indiana.

method for valuing American options by Monte Carlo Simulation; the use of Finite difference methods for option pricing.

He has been faculty at the University of British Columbia and UCLA, and visiting at the London Business School, the University of California, Berkeley and the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. His wide-ranging research has focused on different dimensions in asset and securities pricing.  Topics in recent years include interest rate models, asset allocation issues, evaluating natural resource investments, pricing Internet companies, the stochastic behaviour of commodity prices, valuing patent-protected R&D projects and optimal carbon abatement strategies.  

He has published more than 100 articles in finance and economics journals[3] and with Lenos Trigeorgis is an author of Real Options and Investment Under Uncertainty. He is the winner of a number of awards for both teaching excellence and for the quality of his published work. He has served as associate editor for over 20 journals, including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He is a past president of the Western Finance Association and the American Finance Association. He is a fellow of the American Finance Association and the Financial Management Association International. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Alicante in Spain, by the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, and by the Comillas Pontifical University in Spain, as well as a Catedra de Excelencia by the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. He has also been a consultant to governmental agencies, banks, investment banks and industrial corporations.

Professor Schwartz received a B.Eng. (1963) in Industrial Engineering from the University of Chile, and an M.Sc. (1973) and Ph.D. (1975; supervisor: Michael Brennan) both in business administration from the University of British Columbia.?. He has an Engineering degree from the University of Chile and a Masters and Ph.D. in Finance from the University of British Columbia. He has been in the faculty at the University of British Columbia and visiting at the London Business School and the University of California at Berkeley. His wide-ranging research has focused on different dimensions in asset and securities pricing. Topics in recent years include interest rate models, asset allocation issues, evaluating natural resource investments, pricing Internet companies, the stochastic behavior of commodity prices and valuing patent-protected R&D projects. His collected works include close to on hundred articles in finance and economic journals, two monographs, an edited book, and a large number of monograph chapters, conference proceedings, and special reports. He is the winner of a number of awards for both teaching excellence and for the quality of his published work. He has been associate editor for more than a dozen journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He is past president of the Western Finance Association and the American Finance Association. He is a Fellow of the American Finance Association and the Financial Management Association International. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Alicante in Spain and by the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. He has also been a consultant to governmental agencies, banks, investment banks and industrial corporations.

Edward I. Altman is the Max L. Heine Professor of Finance, Emeritus at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He is the Director of Research in Credit and Debt Markets at the NYU Salomon Center for the Study of Financial Institutions. Prior to serving in his present position, Professor Altman chaired the Stern School's MBA Program for 12 years. Dr. Altman was named to the Max L. Heine endowed professorship at Stern in 1988 and his Emeritus status in September 2015.

Dr. Altman was born and raised in New York City and attended N.Y.C. public schools and the City College of New York, graduating with a BA degree in Economics in 1963. He then went on to pursue a MBA and Ph.D. in Finance from UCLA?s School of Business, receiving the Doctorate in 1967, the same year he married his wife, Elaine Karalus. In 1973, their son, Gregory, was born in Paris, France, where Professor Altman was serving as a Visiting Professor of Finance at Hautes Etudes Commerciales from 1971-early 1973. Dr. Altman returned to France in 1976 and taught a Ph.D. seminar at the University of Paris-Dauphine (Paris IX). Subsequent to his French University experiences, he has been a Visiting Professor in Rio de Janeiro (PUC), Madrid (CEMFI), Naples (Partenope), Sydney (UNSW, Macquarie), Perth (UWA), and Milan (Bocconi).

Dr. Altman has an international reputation as an expert on corporate bankruptcy, high yield bonds, distressed debt and credit risk analysis. He is the creator of the world famous Altman-Z-Score model for bankruptcy prediction of companies globally. He was named Laureate 1984 by the Hautes Etudes Commerciales Foundation in Paris for his accumulated works on corporate distress prediction models and procedures for firm financial rehabilitation and awarded the Graham & Dodd Scroll for 1985 by the Financial Analysts Federation for his work on Default Rates on High Yield Corporate Debt and was named "Profesor Honorario" by the University of Buenos Aires in 1996 and ?Honorary Doctorate? from Lund University (Sweden) in 2011 and the Warsaw School of Economics (Poland) in 2015. He was an advisor to the Centrale dei Bilanci in Italy and to several foreign central banks. Professor Altman is also the Chairman of the Academic Advisory Council of the Turnaround Management Association. He was inducted into the Fixed Income Analysts Society Hall of Fame in 2001, President of the Financial Management Association (2003) and a FMA Fellow in 2004 and was amongst the inaugural inductees into the Turnaround Management Association?s Hall of Fame in 2008. In 2005, Prof. Altman was named one of the ?100 Most Influential People in Finance? by the Treasury & Risk Management magazine.

Professor Altman was one of the founders (1977) and an Executive Editor of the international publication, the Journal of Banking and Finance and Advisory Editor of the publisher series, the John Wiley Frontiers in Finance Series. He was the Co-founder of the International network of Graduate Business Students Exchange Program, now known as PIM, started in 1973.

He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board and an Associate Editor of many academic journals including the Journal of Management and Financial Services (Warsaw), Journal of Credit Risk (London), International Journal of Banking, Accounting & Finance (UK), Revista Mexicana de Economia y Finanzas (Mexico), and Risk & Decision Analysis (Netherlands), as well as the co-founder and coordinator of the International Risk Management Conference (annually since 2008).

He has published or edited two-dozen books and over 160 articles in scholarly finance, accounting and economic journals. He was the editor of the Handbook of Corporate Finance and the Handbook of Financial Markets and Institutions and the author of a number of recent books, including his most recent works on Bankruptcy, Credit Risk and High Yield Junk Bonds (2002), Recovery Risk (2005), Corporate Financial Distress & Bankruptcy (4 th ed., 2019) and Managing Credit Risk (2 nd ed. 2008). His work has appeared in many languages including Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.

Dr. Altman's primary areas of research include bankruptcy analysis and prediction, credit and lending policies, risk management and regulation in banking, corporate finance and capital markets. He has been a consultant to several government agencies, major financial and accounting institutions and industrial companies and has lectured to executives in North America, South America, Europe, Australia-New Zealand, Asia and Africa. He has testified before the U.S. Congress, the New York State Senate and several other government and regulatory organizations and is a Director and a member of the Board of Trustees and Advisory Boards of a number of corporate, publishing, academic and financial institutions, including Franklin Mutual Series and Alternative Investment Funds, Golub Capital, SREI Capital, ESG Portfolio Management, Alpha Fixe in Montreal and a Senior Advisor to Classis Capital in Milan, Italy and Wiserfunding, Ltd. in London.

Dr. Altman is Chairman Emeritus of the InterSchool Orchestras of New York, a founding member of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of American Finance, and a patron of the Pershing Square Signature Theatre Group.

Professor Elroy Dimson chairs the Centre for Endowment Asset Management at Cambridge Judge Business School, and is Emeritus Professor of Finance at London Business School.

His research focuses on responsible investment and long-horizon investing, and he and his co-authors have become well known for their studies of the investment performance since 1900 of financial assets in 23 countries and real assets such as wine, stamps, art and collectibles.

His publications, with several colleagues, on financial market history, endowment asset management, and responsible investing have been recognised by several awards.

Books include Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2020 (with Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton), Financial Market History (with David Chambers), Endowment Asset Management (with Shanta Acharya), and Triumph of the Optimists (with Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton). Publications since 2015 on active ownership (Review of Financial Studies), real assets (Journal of Financial Economics), financial history (Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis), investing in art (Review of Asset Pricing Studies), endowment strategy (Financial Analysts Journal), and factor investing and ESG investing (both Journal of Portfolio Management). Case studies on fossil fuel divestment (Journal of Investing) and on manager selection, real estate, and stocks for the long run (all Harvard Business School).

Dr Dimson chairs the Advisory and Policy Boards of FTSE Russell, and serves on the Advisory Council of Financial Analysts Journal, and the Supervisory Council of the Geneva Finance Research Institute. Until 2016 he chaired the Strategy Council of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, and before going to Cambridge was a Professor and Governor at London Business School.

He is a Fellow or Honorary Fellow of CFA UK, the Institute of Actuaries, the Royal Historical Society, the Risk Institute at Ohio State University, and Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. His PhD is from London Business School.?

Dr Fariborz Moshirian is a Professor of Finance, in the Australian School of Business, at the University of New South Wales and Bertil Danielsson Professor of Finance for 2006 ( Stockholm School of Economics and Nordea Bank) and a Columnist for the CFO Magazine. He is currently serving as an editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance. He has published extensively on a number of issues in the field of international finance, corporate finance, financial services, globalization, financial integration, the European Union, China and the Asia Pacific region in several leading international finance and economic journals such as the Journal of Finance, The World Economy, the Journal of Risk and Insurance, Journal of Banking and Finance and the Journal of International Money and Finance.He has recently co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Banking and Finance on Global financial Crisis, Risk Analysis and Risk Management in collaboration with Asli Demirguc-Kunt from the World Bank and Stijn Claessens from the IMF. Professor Moshirian has been the convenor of the most significant finance conference in the Asia Pacific region, the Australasian Finance and Banking Conference, over the past twelve years. He has served for more than four years as the Head of School of Banking and Finance at the University of New South Wales.

Finn Ostrup is Professor of Finance at the Center of Financial Law, Copenhagen Business School. He has graduated from the University of Copenhagen and is Doctor of Economics (dr. merc.) from Copenhagen Business School. He has previously worked in the Danish Ministry of Economic Affairs and served as Financial Attaché at the Danish Permanent Representation at the European Union and Personal Assistant to the Minister of Economic Affairs. Finn Ostrup research interests cover financial institutions and international monetary economics. He has written eight monographs and about 80 articles. He has served in a number of government committees.

Francesca Cornelli is the dean of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. She is also a professor of finance and holds the Donald P. Jacobs Chair in Finance.

Previously, she was professor of finance and deputy dean at London Business School. She directed and advanced the highly regarded Private Equity Institute of London Business School, building a bridge between academia and practice by partnering with private equity leaders in London, alumni and top academics in the field.

Cornelli is widely respected as an accomplished scholar and a leader in business education. Her research interests include corporate governance, private equity, privatization, bankruptcy, IPOs and innovation policy. She has published several papers in the major finance and economics journals, and she gives regular talks at major conferences and universities. She has been an editor of the Review of Financial Studies, one of the top three finance journals, and previously served on the board of editors of the Review of Economic Studies and as an associate editor at the Journal of Finance. She is a research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and previously served as a director of the American Finance Association.

Cornelli has vast international experience and has taught at some of the top schools in the world, including the Wharton School, the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, The London School of Economics, the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and the New Economic School in Moscow. In January 2016 she helped create and became a board member of AFFECT, a committee of the American Finance Association designed to promote the advancement of women academics in the field of finance. She serves on several boards, including Edizione, GSM Grosvenor Inc., Civic Consulting Alliance, and Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Franklin Allen is Professor of Finance and Economics and Executive Director of the Brevan Howard Centre at Imperial College London and has held these positions since July 2014. He was on the faculty of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from July 1980 ? June 2016. He now has Emeritus status there. He was formerly Vice Dean and Director of Wharton Doctoral Programs, Co-Director of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center, Executive Editor of the Review of Financial Studies and Managing Editor of the Review of Finance. He is a past President of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Society for Financial Studies, the Financial Intermediation Research Society and the Financial Management Association, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He received his doctorate from Oxford University. Dr. Allen's main areas of interest are corporate finance, asset pricing, financial innovation, comparative financial systems, and financial crises. He is a co-author with Richard Brealey and Stewart Myers of the eighth through twelfth editions of the textbook Principles of Corporate Finance.?

Dr. Rhee received his BA from Seoul National University Law School, MBA from Rutgers University, and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. He is holding the Shidler Distinguished Professor of Finance and serves as Executive Director of the Asia-Pacific Financial Markets (FIMA) Research Center at the University of Hawaii. The overall objective of the FIMA Research Center is to spearhead both academic and policy research on financial markets in the Asia-Pacific region, integrating academic and practitioner viewpoints. The FIMA Research Center is globally recognized as a leading research institute in the area of Asian financial markets and banking systems and it is the home of the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, a premier academic journal focusing on Asia-Pacific capital markets and financial systems. Dr. Rhee is managing editor of the Journal. He is currently holding a visiting research professorship at Monash University (Australia) since September 2011 and National Central University (Taiwan) since 2015 for a three-year term. He also serves as External Academic Advisor for City University of Hong Kong for a three-year period from October 2014 to September 2017. He serves as the president of the Asian Finance Association for a two-year period, 2014-2016. He was the founding president of the Pacific-Basin Financial Management Society, an academic association created to promote academic research on the regions financial and capital markets.He also served as a board member of the U.S. Financial Management Association. He served as Program Chair of the Annual Pacific-Basin Finance Conferences, 1989-1997 and of the Asian Finance Association Annual Meetings, 2010-2012. He served as the chairman of the Asian Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (ASFRC) in 2004-2007. The ASFRC is a part of the Global Shadow Financial Regulatory Committees which include the committees of United States, Europe, Japan, Latin America, Australia/New Zealand, and Asia. The ASFRC is charged to identify and analyze developing trends and ongoing events in Asia that may affect the efficiency and safe operation of financial markets and the financial services industry; to explore the spectrum of short- and long-term implications of emerging problems and policy changes; to help develop private, regulatory and legislative responses to problems that hinder efficiency; and to assess and respond to proposed and actual public policy initiatives with respect to the impact on the public interest. He served as the dean (2008-2011) of the SKKU Business School in Seoul, Korea to initiate various reform programs to upgrade its research programs while he is on leave from University of Hawai?i. He was Resident Scholar (1997-1999) of the Asian Development Bank. As Resident Scholar of the Bank, he spearheaded research programs on Asian financial crisis, mortgage-backed securities markets, and government bond markets. He was also involved with financial sector reform programs for Thailand, Indonesia, and Korea as part of the International Monetary Funds support packages. He was a key member of the Bank team which created a regional economic monitoring program and this program eventually led to the creation of the Office of Economic Integration. He was a Professor of Finance and Director of the Sandra Ann Morsilli Pacific-Basin Capital Markets Research Center of the University of Rhode Island. He also taught at University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor of finance. He did teaching at Carnegie-Mellon University, Ohio State University, University of Zagreb, Hanoi School of Business, and Renmin University of China. He also served as a visiting research professor at the Hitotsubashi University (Japan), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, University of Malaya, Renmin University, and National University of Malaysia. He was the Tun Ismail Mohamed Ali Distinguished Chair in Investment and Finance of National University of Malaysia in 2005. His research has been published in numerous academic journals, including: Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Financial Markets, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Risk and Insurance, Journal of Empirical Finance, Journal of Financial Services Research, Journal of International Business Studies, Decision Sciences, Financial Management, etc. He has published over 90 academic papers and edited or authored 18 books on Asian financial markets. Dr. Rhee was a founding member and board member of the Ohana Pacific Bank, which is a state-chartered bank and serves ethnic minority business communities (Korean, Chinese, Philippine, Viet Nam, and Indonesian) in Hawaii. The Bank has been in business since June 2006. He consultedfor a number of international institutions such as Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Bank Institute, International Chamber of Commerce, International Monetary Fund, Mexican Ministry of Finance and Public Credits, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong, United Nations Industrial Development Organization, U.S. Agency for International Development, Bursa Malaysia (formerly Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange), Jakarta Stock Exchange, and MIR Asset Management Ltd. of Australia. He received the 2001 Archimedes Award from University of Catania (Sicily) and Erasmus University (Netherlands) for his contribution to academic research on Asian capital markets.

Giorgio Valente is Senior Manager (Prof. Senior Economist) in the Hong Kong Institute of Monetary Research (HKIMR) of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. Previously, he was in Professor of finance at City University of Hong Kong and held academic positions at, among others, the University of Warwick, UK, the University of Essex, UK and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His work has been published in leading journals in finance and economics and his current research focuses on issues in international finance and macroeconomics and fixed income markets, with particular interest in price determination and forecasting for fixed income and foreign exchange markets and the behavior of international interest rates and security prices.  Giorgio served as co-Editor of Applied Financial Economics and Applied Financial Economics Letters and he is currently on the editorial board of the Pacific Economic Review and the Journal of Financial Studies. Over the years he has been visiting and consulting for several institutions including the US Federal Reserve, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the Bank for International Settlements. Until 2016 he served as member of the Council of Advisers for the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.  In 2010 his profile has been mentioned in the RePeC Top Young Economists (with less than 10 Years from their PhD) and his biography is also included in Marquis Who?s Who in the World, Who?s Who in America and Who?s Who in Asia.?

Dr. Cortazar is Professor of Finance and Director of the FINlabUC-Advanced Research in Finance Laboratory at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He currently serves as a member of the Capital Markets Advisory Council of the Finance Ministry of Chile. He is also the Executive Director of RiskAmerica, a financial information service for financial institutions in Chile. He holds an Industrial Engineering degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and an MBA, a MA in Economics and a PhD in Finance from the University of California at Los Angeles. His research has been published in The Journal of Business, Management Science, The Journal of Derivatives, The Journal of Futures Markets, International Journal of Finance, Computers and Operations Research, Energy Economics, R & D Management, among others. He is editor of Revista de Economía Financiera and member of the editorial board of the Latin American Journal of Economics.

Aggregate Professor of Corporate Finance, Ca`Foscari University, Venice President, H.E.R.M.E.S. Universities Network, Strasbourg Guido Mantovani (Milan, March 28th, 1965) graduates in Business Administration (major in Corporate Finance) at Bocconi University in Milan in the academic year 1989-90. He got his PhD in Business Administration in the Consortium managed by the same University. His experience started in 1990 at Bocconi University as junior researcher (later lecturer) in Corporate Finance and Corporate Risk Management. In 1998 he was appointed as Senior Professor of Corporate Finance at SDA-Bocconi School of Management. In 2001 started to work as professor of Corporate Finance at Ca` Foscari University of Venice. In 2009 he became Deputy-President for Lifelong and Executive Education and founded the Ca`Foscari Challenge School becoming its first Dean (2011-2014). His international teaching experience spreads to ENI Corporate University (1992-2013), VSE University of Economics Prague (1997-99), Harvard Summer School (2006-11), FAU Universitaet Nurnberg (2012-14). Since 2012 he is invited professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at the Ecole de Management de Strasbourg, where he is also President of the H.E.R.M.E.S. Universities Network. He publishes internationally and in Italy on topics concerning contingent claim finance, corporate risk management, information risk premia. More recently he is focusing more on entrepreneurial finance, the financial valuation of human competences and an integrated approach of financial rating and scoring for small and medium enterprises. He is involved in different Academic initiatives including the chairing of the FMA European Conference 2015, the forthcoming European Desk of the Academy of Entrepreneurial Finance of Los Angele, and the co-chairing of the World Finance Conference 2014 in Venice. He was appointed as scientific advisor of several institution including the European Union, Confidustria and a huge number of European Financial Intermediaries.

Harjoat Bhamra is Associate Professor of Finance at Imperial College Business School and the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. He serves as an Associate Editor at Management Science. His main field of research is asset pricing. In particular his work looks at the importance of household heterogeneity for asset prices, the connection between asset prices and corporate finance, and monetary policy. He holds a PhD in Finance from London Business School. He has an MA in Mathematics and an MMath from the University of Cambridge. He has published in the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. He has also worked as a Structured Products Trader in Interest Rate Derivatives at the First National Bank of Chicago, London.

Henrik Cronqvist is the Robert J. and Carolyn A. Waltos Dean and Professor of Economics of the George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California, a position he has held since August 2022. He previously served as a professor of finance, Bank of America scholar, and vice dean for faculty and research at the University of Miami School of Business, where he conducted interdisciplinary research and taught finance and management courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels? Professor Cronqvist received a PhD in Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and an MS in Business and Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics. Previously, he served as the Zhongkun Group Chair at China Europe International Business School, China top-ranked business school. Prior to that, he was the McMahon Family Chair and George R. Roberts Fellow at the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance at Claremont McKenna College. He started his academic career at the Ohio State University, where received the ?Pace Setters Outstanding Research Award, the Fisher College of Business annual research award. He is also a Research Affiliate at the Swedish House of Finance. Professor Cronqvist`s research involves behavioral finance and corporate finance. His work has been published in top-journals in economics, including the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy as well as in finance, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. He is often invited to give seminars at academic conferences and to executives and public policy makers around the world. Several of his research papers have been recognized with best paper awards at international conferences, and have been sponsored by competitive research grants. His work has been featured in the Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and on CNBC. Professor Cronqvist has extensive teaching experience in the US, China, and Europe related to corporate valuation, entrepreneurship, mergers and acquisitions, and private equity, at theMBA, EMBA, and PhD levels. He has developed many business cases, clinical studies, and simulation models, which illustrate complex financial decisions. He is active in executive education and has managed open and in-company programs in emerging markets, and provides consulting advice to global companies related to corporate finance and managerial decision-making. Professor Cronqvist's current research projects involve understanding behaviors and biases of investors and corporate managers. His teaching projects involve blended learning in business education and developing a behavioral finance course.

Professor Huining Henry Cao is Professor of Finance at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. He received his PhD from Yale and UCLA and taught previously at University of California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, Ohio State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of California at San Diego. He has published papers in Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Business, Review of Finance and other journals. He is a Co-Editor of International Review of Financ and is on the editorial board of China Financial Reivew, Annals of Economics of Finance, and Asia Financial Review. Professor Cao's research addresses a wide range of topics, from inside trading to international portfolio flows and asset bubbles. His research on international flows won the best paper on Emerging Markets at the Northern Finance Association in 1996, and other papers won the 2004 China International Conference in Finance Third Prize and the 2005 Western Finance Assocation Best Paper for Financial Analysts Award. He has been a consultant to governmental agencies, banks, investment banks and industrial corporations and his work is frequently cited in media outlets, including The Financial Times, Twenty First Century Economic Reports, Finance and Economics.

Ian Cooper is Professor of Finance at London Business School. He is the former Chair of the London Business School Finance Group and former Director of the Institute of Finance and Accounting. He has a PhD in Finance and MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and MA in Economics from Cambridge. He has also held visiting positions at the University of Chicago and the Australian Graduate School of Management. Professor Cooper has published extensively in leading academic and practitioner journals, including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Journal of Applied Corporate Finance. He has taught extensively to MBA, Masters in Finance, and Executive programs. He has served as a consultant to many corporations, financial institutions, and government agencies. He has also acted as an expert witness in High Court proceedings in various countries.

James R. Lothian is Distinguished Professor of Finance in the School of Business of Fordham University, Editor of the Journal of International Money and Finance and Director of the Frank J.Petrilli Center for Research in International Finance at Fordham. He holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago and a B.A. magna cum laude from the Catholic University of America.

Lothian is a coauthor of The International Transmission of Inflation, and has published extensively on domestic and international economic and financial topics in scholarly journals including the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the Journal of International Money and Finance, as well as in the financial press. His past positions include Vice President in charge of Financial Research for Citibank, N.A., and Visiting Professor of Economics, Leonard Stern School of Business, New York University. He has been a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the International Monetary Fund and the Limburg Institute of Financial Economics at Maastricht University.

Since 1996, Jay R. Ritter has served as the Joseph Cordell Eminent Scholar in the Department of Finance at the University of Florida. He has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. Prof. Ritter is best known for his articles concerning equity issuance, including "The Long-Run Performance of Initial Public Offerings," which won the Smith Breeden Award for the best article in the Journal of Finance during 1991,and The Marketing of Seasoned Equity Offerings,? with Xiaohui Gao, which won the Jensen Prize for the best corporate finance article in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2010. His paper with Rongbing Huang, Testing Theories of Capital Structure and Estimating the Speed of Adjustment,? won the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis Sharpe Award for the best article published in 2009, and his 2013 JFQA article Where Have All the IPOs Gone the Xiaohui Gao and Zhongyan Zhu, won the Sharpe Award for 2013. He has served as a Director of the American Finance Association, and is President of the Financial Management Association for 2014-15. Prof. Ritter is an Associate Editor of numerous academic journals and has over 28,000 citations on Google Scholar. He has also consulted on valuation and market manipulation cases, as well as securities issuance, and is frequently quoted in the financial press. He is a frequent visitor to Europe, Asia, and Australia, and has taught short-course PhD classes in Switzerland, Hong Kong, Germany, Denmark, and Belgium. Ritter received his BA, MA, and PhD (1981) degrees in economics and finance from the University of Chicago.

Jonathan M. Karpoff is the Washington Mutual Endowed Chair in Innovation and Professor of Finance at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. Jon?s research seeks to understand how Adam Smith Invisible Hand works, or does not work, to coordinate economic activities ranging from fisheries management to arctic exploration to corporate governance. His articles have received the Griliches Prize, Sharpe Award, and several other best paper awards. Jon teaches Executive, MBA, and Ph.D finance students, and seeks to inspire an appreciation for the insights of economic analysis in everyday life. Jon recently was named the 2015 recipient of the award for outstanding contribution to research in corporate governance by the Center for Corporate Governance at Drexel University. He also serves as Associate Editor for The Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Management Science, and is a member of the Board of Trustees for The Financial Management Association International.

Joseph Fan is Professor of School of Accountancy and Department of Finance,and Director of Institute of Economics and Finance of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before joining CUHK, he was on faculty of University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. He received his bachelor degree in economics from National Taiwan University, and Ph.D. degree in finance from University of Pittsburgh, USA. Professor Fan is one of the most cited finance professors in Asia. He is an expert in finance and governance of emerging market corporations. He hasdone pioneer research in topics such as political connections of Chinese firms, organizational pyramids of state owned enterprises in China, ownership structure and stock valuation of Asian firms, succession of Chinese family businesses, and marriages and networks in Thailand. He has published many of his works in world top academic journals including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. His research has often been featured by global and regional media, including The Economist, New York Times, Asian Wall Street Journal,Financial Times, and South China Morning Post. Besides teaching and research, Professor Fan has been actively serving theacademic and the business communities. He has organized numerous academic conferences, and regularly gives speeches in academic and business conferences. He is an advisory editor of Financial Management, and associate editor of Corporate Governance: An International Review, International Review of Finance, Journal of Corporate Finance and Pacific-Basin Finance Journal.He has consulting activities with Asian corporations and international organizations including the World Bank and OECD. Professor Fan is married with two children.?

Julian Franks is a Professor of Finance and Academic Director of the Centre of Corporate Governance at the London Business School. Julian is widely published, in which his research focuses on bankruptcy and financial distress, corporate ownership and control, cost of capital and regulation. His work on ownership and control (with Colin Mayer and Stefano Rossi) has won two international prizes. Two of his published papers have been awarded prizes for the best paper of the year.He is Associate Editor of five finance journals. He served as a member of the DTI-Treasury committee for reviewing the UK insolvency code in 2001 and was a member of one of The Company Law Reviews committees on corporate governance. He has been an advisor to Ofcom and its predecessor Oftel for more than 15 years. He also advises other UK regulatory authorities including the ORR and Ofwat. He has been an expert witness for the UK government at The World Court at The Hague on an inter-governmental dispute on the matter of landing rights at Heathrow and more recently for Ofcom in three appeals to the Competition Appeals Tribunal. He advised (with Professor Brealey) The Office of Constitutional Affairs on the issue of outside equity for law firms and provided advice to a Treasury committee chaired by Paul Myners on a review of the governance of mutuals. Recently, he was a member of a government taskforce (the Breedon Committee) investigating new avenues of non bank sources of finance for small to medium sized companies.He is a non-executive director of OXERA and is on the international advisory boards of Stern Stewart. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California at both Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Dr. Jun-Koo KANG is Distinguished Professor of Finance and Head of the Division of Banking and Finance at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He is also director of Insurance Risk and Finance Reserach Centre. Prior to joining NTU, Dr. Kang was the MSU Federal Credit Union Endowed Chair in Financial Institutions and Investments at Michigan State University. Dr. Kang's research interests include corporate finance and international finance, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, capital raising, international portfolio allocation, and banking. His research has been published in leading finance journals, such as Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Business, and Pacific-Basin Finance Journal. He currently serves as a co-editor of Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, an associate editor of International Review of Finance, Japan and the World Economy, and Asia-Pacific Journal of Financial Studies, and an editorial review board member of Journal of International Business Studies. He is also a research fellow of the Asian Institute of Corporate Governance and president of the Korea-America Finance Association. In a recent article by Chan, Chen, and Lee (2011), he was ranked number one in the Asia?Pacific region based on articles published in 21 leading finance journals during 1990-2008. Dr. Kang received his Ph.D. in finance from the Ohio State University.

Kose John is the Charles William Gerstenberg Professor of Banking and Finance at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He holds a Ph.D. from University of Florida. He has also taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Institut D'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences PO). He has won several awards including the Batterymarch Fellowship in 1983 and the Jensen Prize for the Best Paper published in 2000 in the Journal of Financial Economics. He is on the Nominating Committee for the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2017. He is the author of two books (on futures markets and dividend policy) and the editor of 23 books and special issues of finance journals, on topics such as financial stability, financial distress, and valuation of distressed securities, corporate governance, and investments innovations in finance. He has published over 103 research articles in the major finance and economics journals. His recent research focuses on banking, financial crisis, corporate governance, top-management compensation, and financial distress, valuation of distressed claims, and comparative bankruptcy and governance systems. He has completed 57 Working Papers in addition to his published work. He serves as the President of the Financial Management Association International. He also serves as the Program Chair of the Association of Financial Economists. He has been a mentor and advisor to a large number (90) of doctoral students who are finance professors and finance practitioners all over the world. Dr. John received his Bachelor of Science in physics from the University of Kerala, India, his masters in computer science from the Florida Institute of Technology, and his Doctor of Philosophy in management science from the University of Florida.

Lars Oxelheim is professor of International Business and Finance at the School of Business and Law, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway and professor II at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norge. He is affiliated with the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (Institutet för Näringslivsforskning), Stockholm, Sweden and University Cá Foscari, Venice, Italy. Lars Oxelheim is professor emeritus at Lund University, Lund, Sweden and honorary professor at the Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Lars Oxelheim is the founder of the Swedish Network for European Studies in Economics and Business financed by the Swedish Government. Since its launch 1997 Lars Oxelheim has been the network?s chairman. In this role he is - since the start in 1998 - the editor of the annual publication Europaperspektiv and organizer of five annual conferences (in the Nordic region and in Brussels) aimed at disseminating the research results of the book. Lars Oxelheim is the organizer of some hundreds of conferences of which some have targeted researchers, others aimed to bridge the gap between researchers and a general audience and finally some aimed entirely for the business community. He has twice been the program chair and organizer of Financial Management Association?s annual conference in Europe; in Sweden and in Norway. 

Lars Oxelheim's research interests are in the area of the interplay between the firm and its macroeconomic environment encompassing economic and financial integration as well as managerial aspects, corporate governance and risk management. He has authored, co-authored or edited some 45 research books and is the author of a large number of research articles published in international business, finance, and economic journals. Lars Oxelheim is an active member of several international research networks and serves on the editorial board of a number of journals. He is a frequently invited key-note speaker and adviser to corporations and government agencies. He is a delegate of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), of the Royal Society of Letters at Lund and elected fellow of the European International Business Academy (EIBA).

Lorenzo Preve is an associate professor at the Finance Department at IAE, Universidad Austral in Buenos Aires, Argentina, were he is currently serving as the Department Head. Professor Preve holds a PhD in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin, an Executive MBA from IAE, Universidad Austral, and a BA from the Universidad Católica Argentina. He obtained several awards and scholarships for research and teaching excellence (including a Fulbright Scholarship, the FONDECYT Scholarship, the University of Texas at Austin Bruton Fellowship, and the nomination for the Fred Moore Assistant Instructor Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas at Austin). His research topics are mainly focused in empirical corporate finance, more specifically, corporate risk management, financial distress, corporate restructuring, trade credit, and capital structure. He has also a special interest in corporate finance in emerging markets. His papers were published in the Journal of Financial Economics, Financial Management and the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, he is the author of three books and several case studies. Professor Preve serves as a referee for academic journals and conferences, and complements his academic work with appointments as a consultant for several industrial corporations and service firms in Argentina, and Italy.

Mariassunta Giannetti is the Katarina Martinson Professor of Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics, a Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) research fellow, and a research member and fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). Professor Giannetti?s research, published in leading journals in Finance, Economics, and Management, spans topics in corporate finance and financial intermediation, including production networks and trade credit, intermediaries? organizational structures and fire sales, banking and monetary policy, financial integration, and corporate governance and sustainability. Her research has earned recognition and awards, including an ECGI fellowship for scientific excellence in corporate governance research, the Assar Lindbeck Medal, the NYU Stern/ Imperial/ Fordham Rising Star in Finance award, the Sun Yefang Financial Innovation Award, the Review of Finance Pagano-Zechner Prize, the ECGI Standard Life Investments Finance Prize, the Journal of Financial Intermediation best paper award, and the ECB Lamfalussy Research Fellowship. Professor Giannetti has been serving as associate editor of many journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Review of Finance, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Money Credit and Banking, the Journal of Corporate Finance, Financial Management, Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Financial Services Research, and the Journal of Financial Stability, and as a director of the European Finance Association, the Financial Intermediation Research Society, and the Financial Management Association. She is also an advisory board member of the Academic Female Finance Committee (AFFECT) of the American Finance Association and a frequent advisor, visitor, and speaker at central banks worldwide. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and earned her B.A. and M.Sc. from Bocconi University (Italy).

Michael Brennan is a professor of finance at both UCLA Anderson and London Business School. His research interests include asset pricing, corporate finance, the pricing and role of derivative securities, market microstructure, and the role of information in capital markets. He has published extensively in all of these areas. He is currently working on several issues, including: the problem of asset allocation when investors face time-varying opportunity sets, initial public offerings and the allocation of control rights in the corporation, the determinants of international flows of portfolio investment, the role of convertible securities in corporate finance, and corporate hedging strategies. A former president of the American Finance Association, he has served as editor of the Journal of Finance and was the founding editor of the Review of Financial Studies. He has consulted extensively for corporations in Canada and the US, and in 1995 he was awarded the INQUIRE Europe prize for his work on corporate hedging strategies.

Education: Ph.D. Business, 1970, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; MBA Management, 1967, University of Pittsburgh;B.Phil. Economics, 1964, Oxford University.

Michela Verardo is an Associate Professor of Finance at the London School of Economics. She is also a member of the Financial Markets Group and of the Paul Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Markets Dysfunctionality at the London School of Economics. Her research interests focus on empirical asset pricing, investments, and market efficiency, with emphasis on the impact of mutual funds and hedge funds on liquidity and return predictability. Her research has been published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Finance and the Review of Financial Studies. She holds an MA in Economics from Virginia Tech, an MS in Applied Economics from the University of Rochester, and a PhD in Finance from the University of Rochester.

Ariff, on leave now at The University of Tokyo, is a Professor of Finance at the Bond University, Australia only private university. Previously, he held the chair in finance over 10 years and was head of Monash University Finance faculty for six years. He received his post-graduate education at the University of Wisconsin Madison and The University of Queensland (PhD) and earned an upper II honours degree from The University of Singapore. He is an author of a leading McGraw-Hill text-book: Investments by Bodie, Ariff, DaSilva, Kane and Marcus. His peer-reviewed-quality research articles in journals and books published internationally on the Malaysian, Singapore and other capital markets are widely cited. His internationally published scholarly books and journal articles on banking and capital markets, liberalization, exchange rates, privatization and tax-compliance costs, all in the Asian Pacific region, are widely cited in respective literature. He won several competitive research fellowships. He has worked as a visiting scholar/fellow/professor in several universities: Boston; Harvard; Melbourne; Tokyo (twice); and the UCD of Ireland (twice). Among the leading scholars of finance in Asia are several academics and industry professionals whom he supervised. He served in 2004-2006 as the elected president of the 21-year old Asian Finance Association. He is a recipient of three national (ARC) research grants in Australia, and four more awards tenable in Australia, Japan and the USA. He is occasionally invited to give conference speeches. He is a recipient of a large Australian Research Council Linkage grant (with 2 others) on Islamic Banking research.

Mungo Wilson is a Associate Professor of Finance in the Department of Finance at Saïd Business School and an associate member of the Oxford Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, both in the University of Oxford. He specialises in asset pricing and mutual funds. Mungo?s research focuses on asset pricing. In particular, his work is centred on assessing how risk affects asset prices. He also studies mutual funds, analysing how their behaviour is affected by growth,and credit risk. Having studied PPE at the University of Oxford, Mungo initially trained as a solicitor and worked at Slaughter and May, before reading for an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Before joining Sa?d Business School in 2009, Mungo held positions as Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, and as a Visiting Lecturer at theLondon School of Economics.

He holds a PhD in Economics from Fordham University, 1992, a Master of Arts from the Economic University of Athens, 1986 and a Bachelors from the University of Athens, 1984. He is currently a full professor at the University of Piraeus, Greece. His research interests are with Domestic and International Financial Markets.

He has publications in international journals such as: Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions & Money, Kredit und Kapital, International Economic Journal, Atlantic Economic Journal, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Journal of Economics and Finance, Manchester School of Economics, Journal of Economics and Business, Economics Letters.

He has acted as referee for international journals, such as: Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, European Economic Review, Journal of Macroeconomics, Atlantic Economic Journal, International Economic Review.

He is the Editor of International Journal of Economic Research and a ?ember of the Editorial Board in International Advances of Economic Research as well as in the Journal of Economics and Finance.

Nils H. Hakansson is the Sylvan C. Coleman Professor of Finance and Accounting, Emeritus, at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. He is a former member of the faculty at UCLA as well at Yale University. At Berkeley, he served as the Director of two outreach programs, the Berkeley Program in Finance (1988-1991) and the Professional Accounting Program (1985-1988). Professor Hakansson is a Certified Public Accountant and spent three years with Arthur Young & Company (now the Young in Ernst & Young) as an auditor and consultant before receiving his Ph. D. from UCLA in 1966. He has twice been a Visiting Scholar at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and was, in 1975, the Hoover Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and in1982 the Chevron Fellow at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. In 1984, Professor Hakansson was a Special Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics, and was a Visiting Professor at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies in 1996. He is a past president of the Western Finance Association (1983-1984). In 1984 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Stockholm School of Economics. Professor Hakansson has published widely in academic journals and professional volumes as well as a monograph on investing for retirement. His work is focused on investments, asset allocation, security innovation, financial markets, the economics of information, corporate governance, and financial reporting. He has served on the editorial boards of several professional journals and has been a consultant to the RAND Corporation and several businesses and organizations. He is chairman of the board of a foundation and a past board member of Laudus Mutual Funds, Excelsior Mutual Funds, Supershare Services Corporation, and Theatrix Interactive, Inc. He is also a Fellow of the Accounting Researchers International Association and a former member of the Financial Economists Roundtable.

Pablo Fernández López's career at IESE started in 1985. Today he is professor in the department of financial management and holder of IESE's PricewaterhouseCoopers Corporate Finance Chair. He is also visiting professor at the Piura (Peru), INALDE (Colombia), IAE (Argentina), IEEM (Uruguay) and IPADE (Mexico) Business Schools. In addition, he carries out extensive consultancy work for numerous firms and banks. Prof. Fernández López was awarded his Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University.He also holds an M.B.A. from IESE and a degree in industrial engineering from the University of Navarra in San Sebastian. Before embarking on a career in academia, he was the financial analyst and financial coordinator of Pepsi Cola for the south of Europe (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Libya and Malta) in Spain, a position he also held in Rome. Among other important appointments, Prof. Fernández López was a member of the jury that awarded the sixth ACECA prize for outstanding articles on corporate accounts and administration (2000) and was also on the board of the McKinsey best Internet project award (2000). In 2004, he received the IESE award for outstanding research. Earlier in his career he received the BARRA award for a project he undertook under the aegis of the Institute for Quantitative Investment Research (INQUIRE) titled "Convertible Bonds in Spain: a Different Security" (1991). Prof. Fernández López is a widely published author with an impressive list of book chapters, working and research papers, case studies, technical notes and journal articles on his curriculum. Recent book chapters include "Valuation of Brands and Intellectual Capital" in Brand Valuation -Concepts and Applications (2005). In June 2006 he published the article "A New Formula for Value Creation" in the prestigious Financial Times.

Paul B. McGuinness is a Tenured Professor in the Department of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He has also served as Chairman of the Department for two extended terms (August 2000, July 2004; and August 2005-July 2009). Prior to his appointment at CUHK, Prof. McGuinness was a faculty member of the School of Industrial and Business Studies at the University of Warwick (UK). He has also held, while on leave from CUHK, positions as the National Bank Chair of Finance at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (January-December 1996), Head of Research at the Hong Kong securities regulator, the Securities and Futures Commission (July-December 2000), and Visiting Professor in the Department of Economics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia (Mid February, June 2008). Professor McGuinness has taught widely in undergraduate, graduate and executive programmes in the UK, Hong Kong, Mainland China, New Zealand and Australia. His research activities are in financial markets, securities analysis and corporate finance. He has published widely including a book entitled, A Guide to the Equity Markets of Hong Kong (Oxford University Press, 1999), and has numerous published papers in internationally-refereed journals, as well as several publications in professional and business-style journals. He has also conducted consultancy work pertaining to securities market-related issues in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Professor McGuinness obtained a Ph. D at the University of Leeds (UK), an M.Phil Degree at the University of Cambridge (UK) and a B.A. Honours (First Class) Degree at the University of Newcastle (UK).

Rajna Gibson Brandon is Professor of Finance at the University of Geneva since September 2008 and Deputy Director of the Geneva Finance Research Institute. She was the founder and the Director of the Geneva Finance Research Institute (GFRI) at the University of Geneva between 2009 and 2016, and is the Chairwomen and Managing Director of the Geneva Institute of Wealth Management (GIWM) since 2016. From 2007 until 2015, she was Head of Research at the Swiss Finance Institute. She was the Director of the National Centre of Competence in Research Finrisk from 2001 to 2009. She was previously Professor of Finance at the University of Zurich, at the University of Lausanne and she was Assistant ? Professor in Finance at HEC, Paris and  a visiting scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles and at New York University.. She holds a Ph.D in Economic  Sciences from the University of Geneva.

She was also Member of the Board of Directors of Swiss Re from June 2000 to April 2018 and  was from November 2018 to September 2023 , a Member of the Board of Directors of Group BNP, France and since May 2022, she is a  Member of the Board of Directors of the Swiss National Bank (SNB). She is also a Member of the Surveillance Board of Sustainable Finance Geneva, a Member of the Academic Advisory Board of RepRisk and has been a Member of the Swiss Federal Banking Commission (currently FINMA) from 1997 to 2004.

Her research interests cover asset pricing, experimental finance and sustainable finance. She has published papers in particular in the Journal of Finance, the American Economic Review, Review of Finance, Scientific Reports, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Banking and Finance and in Mathematical Finance.

Raman Uppal is Professor of Finance at Edhec Business School. He holds a bachelors degree in Economics (Honors) from St. Stephen College at Delhi University, and M.A., M.B.A and Ph.D. degrees from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on optimal portfolio selection and asset allocation in dynamic environments, valuation of securities in capital markets, risk management, and exchange rates. He is an editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance, an associate editor of the Review of Asset Pricing Studies, a member of the editorial board of Mathematics and Financial Economics, and a former editor of the The Review of Financial Studies and the Review of Finance. With Piet Sercu, he is the author of the textbook "International Financial Markets and the Firm" (1995, South-Western Publishing) and of the research monograph "Exchange Rate Volatility, Trade and Capital Flows under Alternative Exchange Rate Regimes" (2000, Cambridge University Press), which received the Sanwa Monograph Award from New York University. His research has received a number of other awards from the Western Finance Association, Inquire-UK, and Europlace Institute of Finance (Institut Europlace de Finance). He has also received awards for excellence in teaching from The Wharton School, The University of British Columbia, and London Business School.

Professor René Garcia is a graduate of ESSEC and received his doctorate in economics from Princeton University. Before coming to EDHEC, René Garcia was a professor at the Université de Montréal, where he taught econometrics and finance. He was also the holder of the Hydro-Québec chair in integrated risk management and financial mathematics as well as the recipient of a research fellowship from the Bank of Canada. In addition to research and teaching, he was the scientific director of CIRANO, an interuniversity center for research on the analysis of organizations. Until 2004 he was vice-president of the center's finance group. He was the co-founder, together with Eric Renault, of the Journal of Financial Econometrics, published by Oxford University Press, and is currently its editor-in-chief. His research interests in finance revolve around the valuation of financial assets, portfolio management, and risk management. In econometrics, he is interested in nonlinear models, in particular regime-switching models. René has published his research in leading international journals.

René M. Stulz is the Everett D. Reese Chair of Banking and Monetary Economics and the Director of the Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics at The Ohio State University. He has also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was awarded a Marvin Bower Fellowship from the Harvard Business School, a Doctorat Honoris Causa from the University of Neuchâtel, and the Risk Manager Award of the Global Association of Risk Professionals. In 2004, the magazine Treasury and Risk Management named him one of the 100 most influential people in finance. A recent study found that he was the sixth most often cited contributor to the top journals in financial economics from 2003 to 2008. He is a past president of the American Finance Association and of the Western Finance Association, and a fellow of the American Finance Association, of the Financial Management Association, and of the European Corporate Governance Institute.

René M. Stulz was the editor of the Journal of Finance, the leading academic publication in the field of finance, for twelve years. He is on the editorial board of more than ten academic and practitioner journals. Further, he is a member of the Asset Pricing and Corporate Finance Programs and the director of the Risk of Financial Institutions Group of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a member of the Squam Lake Group.

He has published more than sixty papers in finance and economics journals, including the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Finance, and the Review of Financial Studies. He is the author of a textbook titled Risk Management and Derivatives, a co-author of the Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System, and has edited several books, including the Handbook of the Economics of Finance.René M. Stulz has taught in executive development programs in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He has consulted for major corporations, law firms, the New York Stock Exchange, the IMF, and the World Bank. He is a director of Banque Bonhote, the president of the Gamma Foundation, and a trustee of the Global Association of Risk Professionals.

Richard Brealey is Emeritus professor of finance at London Business School. He was a full-time faculty member 1968-1998, the director of the School?s Institute of Finance and Accounting 1974-1985, and Deputy Principal and Governor 1984-1988. From 1998-2001 he served as Special Advisor to the Governor of the Bank of England. He has held visiting appointments at University of California, Berkeley, University of Hawaii, University of British Columbia, and Australian Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and holds honorary doctorates from London University and Technical University of Lisbon. He has served as President of the European Finance Association and as a director of the American Finance Association, and has been a member of the board of a number of financial institutions. His publications include the textbook Principles of Corporate Finance (with Stewart Myers and Franklin Allen, McGraw-Hill Irwin, 10th ed 2011).

Robert Faff is currently Professor of Finance and the Director of Research at University of Queensland Business School, Australia. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Leeds University Business School and the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Prior to this, for 6 years he held the position of Research Professor of Finance at RMIT. His research publications list exceeds 200 articles in a broad range of refereed international finance, accounting and economics journals (across 59 different titles) including the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Business and Journal of Banking and Finance. A recent article in the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal (2005), Ranking of Finance Programs in the Asia-Pacific Region: An Update?, by Kam Chan, Carl Chen and Peter Lung, assessed the research productivity of 170 Finance Departments at universities based in the Asia Pacific region. The article ranks finance professors based on weighted Journal of Finance ? equivalent page counts across 21 journals, and according to this measure over the period 1990-2004, Robert ranked number one in the Asia Pacific region. In addition, Robert is the current Editor of Accounting and Finance; has presented in excess of 110 research seminars/workshops at domestic and international universities; and has supervised more than 20 successful PhD students.

Ron Masulis is Scientia Professor and AGSM Scholar at UNSW School of Business, University of New South Wales, Sydney?,

Professor Masulis is one of the foremost authorities in the field of empirical corporate finance, and an expert on corporate governance issues. He has worked on research topics in investment banking, venture capital, private equity, mergers and acquisitions, international finance, law and finance and topics in corporate governance such as boards of directors, executive compensation, takeover defenses and shareholder voting rights. He has published 34 refereed articles in the top academic journals in Finance, Economics, Financial Accounting, Law and Statistics, including 24 in the top four finance journals. He was named a Research Associate at the European Corporate Governance Institute in 2009.

Professor Masulis`s research has been cited in published scholarly articles over 1400 times according to the Web of Science. He is ranked in the top 50 business school scholars in the world according to SSRN. He is ranked one of the top 100 most prolific authors in finance for the last 50 years, based on publications in 7 leading academic journals in finance according to Heck and Cooley "Most Prolific Authors in the Finance Literature: 1959-2008". He has also won five Journal of Financial Economics All Star Awards for his high impact research which continues to be heavily cited by other researchers. Dr. Masulis has served on the Board of Directors/Executive Committee of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association and the Financial Management Association. He is associate editor of two academic journals in finance, and is past associate editor of all four top finance journals. He was also co-editor of a special issue of the Financial Management.

Prof. Masulis has an MBA and a Ph.D. degree in economics and finance from the University of Chicago. Prior to entering academia, he worked in the acquisition department of a Fortune 500 company. He has also worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission and several other financial institution regulatory agencies. His prior faculty positions are associated professor at UCLA and a chaired professor at Southern Methodist University. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, Emory University, European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of New South Wales and the Norwegian School of Management and a visiting scholar at Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Hawaii and Indiana University.

Dr. Sankar De was the Executive Director, Centre for Analytical Finance (CAF), Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India. Prior to his present position, he taught in graduate programs at Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, USA, his alma mater.

Dr. De?s teaching and research interests include all major fields of corporate finance, including corporate valuation, corporate diversification and planning, and corporate mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs. His pioneering research work on the merger and consolidation of financial institutions received a US national research award. Since coming to ISB, his research work has focused on institutional finance and trading behavior of investors in emerging markets. He has been profiled in Business Week?s annual Guide to the Best Business Schools.

Dr. De has advised several major corporations and agencies, including the Securities Exchange Corporation of the USA and the Securities Exchange Board of India. He received his MBA degree from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and PhD from University of California, Berkeley.

Steven Ongena is a professor of banking in the Department of Finance at the University of Zurich, a senior chair at the Swiss Finance Institute, a research professor at KU Leuven, a research professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU Business School, and a research fellow in financial economics of CEPR.

He is also a research professor at the Deutsche Bundesbank, a regular research visitor at the European Central Bank, a fellow of CFS, and the chair of the Research Advisory Council of SAFE. Before moving to Zurich, he taught at CentER-Tilburg University and BI Norwegian Business School and was at the University of Oregon (PhD), SOR-BE (OF-1), University of Alberta (MA), and KU Leuven (MBA, Hir).

He is publishing in economics, finance, law, management, and public governance journals. He co-authored, with Hans Degryse and Moshe Kim, the graduate textbook entitled Microeconometrics of Banking: Methods, Applications and Results published by Oxford University Press.

He is currently a co-editor of Economic Inquiry, the International Journal of Central Banking, the International Review of Finance and the Journal of Financial Services Research, and an associate editor of the Journal of Financial Stability, Economic Notes, the Asian Review of Financial Research, and the Journal of Financial Management, Markets and Institutions. In the past he has served as a co-editor for the Review of Finance and as an associate editor for the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Intermediation, the Journal of Financial Services Research, the European Economic Review and the Journal of Banking and Finance, among other journals.

Tan Wang is Professor of Finance and Deputy Dean for Faculty at Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF), Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Prior to joining SAIF, he was Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Waterloo from 1992-1996 and Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Peter Lusztig Professor of Finance at University of British Columbia from 1996-2014. Professor Wang was a visiting professor at MIT (2001). Professor Wang was also a visiting scholar with the International Monetary Fund (2005) and Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (2003). Professor Wang?s research areas include asset pricing, decision making under risk and uncertainty, systemic risk in banking, investment and risk management. Professor Wang has published extensively in leading finance journals including Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Finance, Management Science, Journal of Economic Theory, Mathematical Finance and Econometrica. Most notably, Professor Wang?s research paper, ?Privatization and Risk Sharing: Evidence from the Split Share Structure Reform in China?, published in The Review of Financial Studies has just recently been awarded 2014. Professor Wang offers a number of courses at SAIF, including Risk Management and Financial Engineering. Professor Wang received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Toronto (1992).

Tim Jenkinson is Professor of Finance at the Said Business School, Oxford University. One of the leading authorities on private equity, IPOs, and institutional asset management, Tim is renowned for his ability to collect critical, previously inaccessible, data by building strong links with institutional investors, banks and other players in the financial industry. His research is widely quoted and has been published in the top academic journals. He is Director of the Oxford Private Equity Institute, and is one of the founders of the Private Equity Research Consortium. Tim is a renowned teacher and presenter, and teaches executive courses on private equity, entrepreneurial finance, and valuation. He is a frequent keynote speaker at practitioner conferences and his research has recently been awarded the 2015 Commonfund Prize (for the paper with the most relevance to institutional investors) and a 2014 Brattle Group Prize (awarded by the American Finance Association for the best research on corporate finance). Outside of academe he is a partner at the leading economics consultancy Oxera. He specializes on valuation, regulation, and corporate finance, and has been an expert witness in several high-profile cases. He is also on the board of DFC Global Corporation and has previously held board positions in several funds and companies. He studied economics as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, before going as a Thouron Fellow to the University of Pennsylvania. He then returned to the UK and obtained a DPhil in Economics from Oxford. Tim?s personal website is at www.sbs.oxford.edu/timjenkinson Oxera?s corporate website is at www.oxera.com

Prof. Tom Smith is Frank Finn Professor of Finance at the University of Queensland Business School, Australia. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business at the Stanford University. Tom?s research interests are in the areas of Asset Pricing Theory and Tests; Design of Markets - Market Microstructure; and Derivatives. His articles have appeared in leading journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Business, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Empirical Finance, Journal of Futures Markets, Journal of Fixed Income and Journal of Portfolio Management. Tom is particularly proud of all of his PhD students and the fact that they have more than 50 tier 1 publications.

Ivadelle and Theodore Johnson Chair of Banking and Finance, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California since 2007. Collins Chair in Finance, Boston College (2001-06). Pigott PACCAR Professor, University of Washington (1992-2001). Visiting professor at Stanford University, Arizona State University, the University of Miami and the University of South Carolina, Assistant Professor at the Wharton School (1981-83), Assistant and Associate professor at the University of Chicago (1983-92). Editor, Review of Asset Pricing Studies, President, Society of Financial Studies (2005-08), Editor, Journal of Empirical Finance (2004-06), President, Western Finance Association (2000-01), Editor, Review of Financial Studies (1996-99), Director of the American Finance Association (1997-99), Director of the Western Finance Association (1993-96) and Vice President (1998-99), Associate Editor for various journals, Steering Committee, Financial Economists Round Table (2008-12). Best Discussant Award, Financial Research Association (2005), Smith-Breeden Prize Nominee (1992, 93, 96, 2001, 03), Berstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy award for Journal of Portfolio Management paper (2005), Dean's Research Award, University of Washington Business School (1997), New York Stock Exchange Award for the best paper on equity trading at the Western Finance Association meeting (1993), Graham and Dodd Scroll for Financial Analysts Journal paper (1991).

George Lynn Cross Professor of Finance , Finance PhD Program Director, Michael F. Price Chair in Finance.

Bill Megginson is Professor and Price Chair in Finance at the University of Oklahoma?s Michael F. Price College of Business. He is also Visiting Professor at the University of International Business and Economics (Beijing) and Consulting Editor for the Journal of International Business Studies. From 2002 to 2007, he was a voting member of the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance?s Global Advisory Committee on Privatization. During spring 2008, he was the Fulbright Tocqueville Distinguished Chair in American Studies and Visiting Professor at the Université-Paris Dauphine. He received the University of Oklahoma?s top research prize, a George Lynn Cross Research Professorship, in April 2010. From 2013 to 2019 he was the Saudi Aramco Chair Professor in Finance at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Professor Megginson's research interest has focused in recent years on the privatization of state-owned enterprises, sovereign wealth fund investments, energy finance, and investment banking principles and practices. He has published refereed articles in several top academic journals, including the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Foreign Policy. His co-authored study documenting significant performance improvements in recently privatized companies received one of two Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper Awards for outstanding research published in the Journal of Finance during 1994. He is author or co-author of nine textbooks.

Professor Megginson?s research has been frequently cited in academic and professional publications. His articles have been downloaded over 66,000 times from the Social Sciences Research Network, and his books and articles have been cited over 23,000 times (according to Google Scholar). His co-authored privatization survey article, published in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2001, is the eighth most widely cited finance article published since 2000, and the most widely cited article published in 2001. He is associate editor for two academic journals, and has served as a privatization consultant for the New York Stock Exchange, the OECD, the IMF, the World Federation of Exchanges, and the World Bank. He has visited 85 countries during his lifetime, and has lived in Spain, Pakistan, France, and Saudi Arabia, in addition to the United States.

Dr. Megginson has a B.S. degree in chemistry from Mississippi College, an MBA from Louisiana State University, and a Ph.D. in finance from Florida State University. Prior to entering academia in 1986, he worked for five years as a petroleum chemist at the world's largest styrene monomer plant and at the largest independent petroleum refinery in the United States. He has been a Visiting Professor at Duke University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Zurich, the University of Amsterdam, Bocconi University, Université-Paris Dauphine.

Yong H. Kim is Head of the Finance Department at the University of Cincinnati and holds the rank of full professor since 1988. He was CBA Faculty Fellow (1988-94) at UC and the first Fulbright Professor of Business Administration at Seoul National University (1988-89) where he received presidential citation for the highest scholastic achievement (1968). He also held teaching positions at Penn State, Hawaii, Sogang, and Soongsil. His Ph.D. degree is from Penn State.

Professor Kim's over sixty publications are in Journal of Finance, Management Science, Financial Management, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Empirical Finance, International Review of Finance, Financial Analysts Journal, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Journal of Risk and Insurance, Managerial and Decision Economics, Decision Support Systems, Computers & Operations Research, International Journal of Production Research, OMEGA, Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research, International Review of Economics and Finance, Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, Engineering Economist among several other refereed journals. He has advised numerous public and private organizations in the U.S. and Korea.

Being a recent President of KAEA (Korea-America Economic Association, 2007), Dr. Kim also served as founding President of KAFA (Korea-America Finance Association, 1992-95) and established its annual joint conference with allied associations for financial studies in Korea (1994-present). His other professional services include: Executive Director, International Symposium on Cash, Treasury and Working Capital Management (1986-98); Founding Editor, Advances in Working Capital Management (Elsevier Science, 1986-02); Track Chair, FMA (Financial Management Association, 1998); Advisory Board, Corporate Finance Review (1995-present); Editorial Board, Global Finance Journal (1992-present) and Credit and Financial Management Review (1994-present); Associate Editor, International Journal of Finance (1995-present), The Financial Review (1991-97); and Managing Editor, KASTN (Korean-American Science and Technology News, 2004-present) and IEKAS (Information Exchange for Korean American Scholars, 2004-present); Board, SFSC (Shadow Financial Services Commission of Korea, 2007-present). His doctoral students have been initially placed at Oregon State, BYU, FHLB, Howard, Northeastern, Hawaii, Wayne State, and BGSU.

Zacharias Sautner is Professor of Sustainable Finance at the Department of Finance of the University of Zurich (UZH) and a senior chair at the Swiss Finance Institute (SFI). Through his research on ESG topics such as climate change or biodiversity, he provides insights on how finance can contribute to a more sustainable future. He enjoys spreading his sustainable finance views in keynote speeches around the world.

His research was published in leading international journals, and he was ranked #23 globally across 12,000 business authors in a ranking based on SSRN research paper downloads (January 2023, calculated over the past 12 months). Two of his papers were ranked #3 and #4 in a Financial Times ranking of ?Business School Sustainability Research: What is Read Most?? (July 2023). His research has been cited more than 6,500 times according to Google Scholar and downloaded about 100,000 times on SSRN, and his expertise is referenced in newspapers such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or Financial Times, and in reports by the IMF, ECB, or European Commission as well as in speeches by central bankers.

Sautner acts as Associate Editor at the Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, Journal of Financial & Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Banking & Finance, Financial Management, and Journal of Corporate Finance. He is also a Research Consultant (Regular Research Visitor) at the ECB and advises institutional investors on ESG issues.

Prior to moving to Switzerland, he was Professor of Finance at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, where he headed for many years the finance department.

He is the proud father of three daughters (born 2017, 2019, 2021), making him intrinsically motivated to work hard for a sustainable future.