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