Ron Masulis is the Scientia Professor of Finance at the UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales. Ron received his MBA and PhD from the University of Chicago. He is a recognised authority in the areas of empirical corporate finance and corporate governance. His published research spans investment banking, financial institutions, market microstructure, international finance, private equity, law and economics and corporate governance topics such as mergers and acquisitions, boards of directors, executive compensation, ownership structure and business groups. Among financial economists worldwide, he has one of the highest sustained rates of top tier publications and frequency of citations across a range of top journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Accounting and Economics and Journal of Law and Economics. Ron has won a number of top research awards, including five Journal of Financial Economics All Star Paper Awards. He is the President-Elect of the Financial Management Association. He has served on the Board of Directors/Executive Committee of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association and the Financial Management Association (FMA). He has served as the FMA’s Vice President of Global Services and FMA's Vice President of the 2018 Program. Ron also recently served on the board of directors of the Financial Intermediation Research Society (FIRS), was an advisory editor of Financial Management and is currently an advisory editor of the Journal of Multinational Financial Management, an associate editor of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, the Journal of Financial Stability and is a past associate editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance and Review of Financial Studies. Ron is a research associate at the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and senior academic fellow at the Asia Bureau of Finance and Economic Research and a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. In February 2015, he was the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Term Professor of Economics and Finance at NUS and from September -December 2015. He was a Distinguished Visiting Research Professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and in the 2 half of 2018 he was the Pembroke visiting Professor of International Finance at the University of Cambridge.
Title of Address : The benefits of female independent directors in companies with overoptimistic CEOs
Professor of Finance Avanidhar (Subra) Subrahmanyam (Ph.D. ’90) is an expert in stock market activity and behavioral finance. He is known for his pathbreaking research in the use of psychological principles to explain stock price movements and has published numerous articles in leading peer-reviewed finance and economics journals. Appearing frequently in the media, Subrahmanyam is consulted for his expertise on the superior performance of value stocks and the phenomenon of stock market momentum to analyze spikes in gasoline prices, herd-like behavior around Apple stock, uncertainty in everyday use of the bitcoin crypto-currency and the effects of war on the stock market. Subrahmanyam’s current research interests range from the relationship between the trading environment of a firm’s stock and the firm’s cost of capital to behavioral theories for asset price behavior and empirical determinants of the cross-section of equity returns. “We need to accept that humans are governed by a number of non-rational considerations,” he says in relation to investing behaviors. “An investor may be reluctant to admit an erroneous investment decision, which may prevent correction of over-heated stock market valuations. Academic research has indicated to investors that irrational investing can cause a significant loss of wealth.” A founding editor of the Journal of Financial Markets, Subrahmanyam previously served as associate editor of the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Finance. He is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Working Research Group on Market Microstructure. His scholarly efforts have been recognized with best paper awards at the Western Finance Association meetings and the International Conference of Finance in Taiwan, and he was honored with the Smith Breeden Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Finance (1999). His documentation of market liquidity led to a number of studies analyzing why trading costs fluctuate over time and earned him the Fama-DFA prize for the best paper on investments published in the Journal of Financial Economics (2000). Subrahmanyam has served as a consultant to the Nasdaq Stock Market, the National Stock Exchange in Mumbai, India, San Jose Mercury News and Irwin/McGraw-Hill. He is a UCLA Anderson Inspirational 100 alumnus.
Title of Address: The capital market implications of climate risk disclosure
