AFA elects two GSB professors

George Constantinides, the Leo Melamed Professor of Finance in the GSB, is the new AFA President, and Douglas Diamond, the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance in the GSB, is the new Vice President.

The AFA is the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics. The AFA also has published The Journal of Finance since 1946.

Eugene Fama, the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance in the GSB, was elected as the association’s first inductee into the newly formed Society of Fellows. “Eugene Fama was recognized by the AFA for his outstanding lifetime contributions to the field of finance. The decision was unanimous,” said Constantinides.

The AFA awarded its Smith Breeden Prize for the best paper published in 2000 in The Journal of Finance to Tobias Moskowitz and Joshua Coval for “Home Bias at Home: Local Equity Preference in Domestic Portfolios.” Moskowitz is Assistant Professor of Finance in the GSB, and his co-author Coval is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Business School.

Raghuram Rajan, the Joseph L. Gidwitz Professor of Finance in the GSB, and Luigi Zingales, Professor of Finance in the GSB, along with Henri Servaes, professor of finance at the London Business School, were awarded the Brattle Prize for a distinguished paper published in 2000.

The Brattle Prize, which is awarded annually to outstanding papers in corporate finance that have been published in The Journal of Finance in the preceding year, was given to the three professors for their paper, “The Cost of Diversity: The Diversification Discount and Insufficient Investment.”

Additionally, Rajan was elected as one of six members of the AFA’s 2001 board of directors.