AFA Presidential Addresses

The following are links to the Presidential Address of the American Finance Association from 1972 to 2020*. These addresses are often used by the heavy hitters in the profession to float big ideas and encourage deep thinking. There are a lot of very successful past, present, and future research ideas buried in here.

1972 Joseph A. Pechman - Distribution of Federal and State Income Taxes by Income Classes

1973 Irwin Friend - Mythodology in Finance

1974 Sherman J. Maisel - The Economic and Finance Literature and Decision Making

1975 John Lintner - Inflation and Security Returns

1976 Myron J. Gordon - A Portfolio Theory of the Social Discount Rate and the Public Debt

1977 Merton H. Miller - Debt and Taxes

1978 Alexander A. Robichek - Regulation and Modern Finance Theory

1979 Burton G. Malkiel - The Capital Formation Problem in the United States

1980 Edward J. Kane - Market Incompleteness and Divergences Between Forward and Futures Interest Rates

1981 William F. Sharpe - Decentralized Investment Management

1982 Franco Modigliani - Debt, Dividend Policy, Taxes, Inflation and Market Valuation

1983 Harry M. Markowitz - A Question about CAPMs

1984 Stewart C. Myers - The Capital Structure Puzzle

1985 James C. Van Horne - Of Financial Innovations and Excesses

1986 Fischer Black - Noise

1987 Robert C. Merton - A Simple Model of Capital Market Equilibrium with Incomplete Information

1988 Richard Roll - R2

1989 Stephen A. Ross - Institutional Markets, Financial Marketing, and Financial Innovation

1990 Michael J. Brennan - Latent Assets

1991 Myron S. Scholes - Stock and Compensation

1992 Robert H. Litzenberger - Plain and Fanciful

1993 Michael C. Jensen - The Modern Industrial Revolution, Exit, and the Failure of Internal Control Systems

1994 Mark Rubinstein - Implied Binomial Trees

1995 Sanford J. Grossman - Dynamic Asset Allocation and the Informational Efficiency of Markets

1996 Martin J. Gruber - The Growth in Actively Managed Mutual Funds

1997 Eduardo S. Schwartz - Implications for Valuation and Hedging

1998 Hayne E. Leland - Agency Costs, Risk Management, and Capital Structure

1999 Edwin J. Elton - Expected Return, Realized Return, and Asset Pricing Tests

2000 Hans R. Stoll - Friction

2001 Franklin Allen - Do Financial Institutions Matter

2002 George M. Constantinides - Rational Asset Prices

2003 Maureen O'Hara - Liquidity and Price Discovery

2004 Douglas W. Diamond - Short-Term Debt When Enforcement Is Costly

2005 René M. Stulz - The Limits of Financial Globalization

2006 John Y. Campbell - Household Finance

2007 Richard C. Green - Issuers, Underwriter Syndicates, and Aftermarket Transparency

2008 Kenneth R. French - The Cost of Active Investing

2009 Jeremy C. Stein - Sophisticated Investors and Market Efficiency

2010 Darrell Duffie - Asset Price Dynamics with Slow-Moving Capital

2011 John C. Cochrane - Discount Rates

2012 Raghuram G. Rajan - The Corporation in Finance

2013 Sheridan Titman - Financial Markets and Investment Externalities

2014 Robert Stambaugh - Investment Noise and Trends

2015 Luigi Zingalez - Does Finance Benefit Society

2016 Patrick Bolton - Debt and Money Financial Constraints and Sovereign Finance

2017 Campbell Harvey - The Scientific Outlook in Financial Economics

2018 David Scharfstein - Pension Policy and the Financial System

2019 Peter DeMarzo - Collateral and Commitment

2020 David Hirshleifer - Social Transmission Bias in Economics and Finance


* Thanks, by the way to Ben Charoenwong at NUS for pushing me to update this list through 2020 by sending me the updated addresses.