RCFS News

Investors increasingly rely on proxy advisors such as ISS in deciding how to vote in corporate elections. In the paper “Information Bias in the Proxy Advisory Market,” Shichao Ma and Yan Xiong construct a theoretical model to examine the biases that can arise when the proxy advisor is a profit-maximizer. An intuitive finding is that a conflicted proxy advisor provides biased recommendations. More interestingly, if shareholders have either distorted preferences… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Information Bias in the Proxy Advisory Market

“Crisis Poison Pills” by Ofer Eldar and Michael D. Wittry

The Call for Papers for Stockholm Business School’s 3rd Future of Financial Information Conference is now available. The conference, which features a dual submission option with the Review of Asset Pricing Studies and the Review of Corporate Finance Studies, will take place May 19-21, 2021, both virtually and on campus. The RAPS sponsoring editor is Thierry Foucault and the RCFS sponsoring editor is Andrew Ellul. The submission deadline is December… Read More »3rd Future of Financial Information Conference

“Proxy Advisory Firms, Governance, Market Failure, and Regulation” by Chester S. Spatt

Camelia Kuhnen begins her role as an editor of RCFS today. Camelia is a professor of finance and Sarah Graham Kenan distinguished scholar at UNC Kenan-Flagler and a faculty research associate at NBER. She is an expert in household finance, neuroeconomics, and corporate finance. She is an associate editor at the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science. Camelia previously served as president of the Society… Read More »Camelia Kuhnen Joins the RCFS Team

                The COVID-19 pandemic induced an unprecedented “stress test” on the financial system and the ability of banks to supply liquidity to the real economy. A new paper by Lei Li, Phil Strahan, and Song Zhang entitled “Banks as Lenders of First Resort: Evidence from the COVID-19 Crisis” starts with the following important observation: In the last three weeks of March 2020, banks… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Banks as Lenders of First Resort: Evidence from the COVID-19 Crisis

The program for the 17th Annual Conference on Corporate Finance​ at Washington University is now available. The conference will take place October 30–31, 2020. Registration is required: register here. The conference features a session, joint with RCFS, on “financing innovations.”

As we emerge from the first wave of shocks induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to start asking pressing questions regarding the future beyond the first round of emergencies. It is an appropriate time to start asking about the long-term adjustments that could be taking place in financial markets and economies and the research questions to match those challenges. This is the main objective of the paper “The Macroeconomics… Read More »Paper Spotlight: The Macroeconomics of Corporate Debt