Minutes of the 2016 Annual Membership Meeting

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12428
• Published date: 01 August 2016
• Date: 01 August 2016

THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE •VOL. LXXI, NO. 4 •AUGUST 2016

AMERICAN FINANCE ASSOCIATION

Minutes of the 2016 Annual Membership Meeting

The Seventy Sixth Annual Membership Meeting was held at the San Francisco

Marriott Marquis on January 4, 2016 at 5:30 pm. The video of the meeting

has been posted on the AFA website. Executive Secretary and Treasurer Jim

Schallheim called the meeting to order and welcomed those in attendance.

The results of the 2015 election were announced as follows:

President: Campbell Harvey

President Elect: David Scharfstein

Vice President: Peter DeMarzo

Directors: Xavier Gabaix

Arvind Krishnamurthy

Lubos Pastor

The Association thanks the outgoing Directors for their service: Jonathan

Berk, Francesca Cornelli, and Ivo Welch.

EST Schallheim reported that the Association’s financial condition is strong

(see his report in this issue for details). The AFA instituted a policy in 2015

that all authors of papers submitted to the program must be members. This

policy has helped to increase our individual membership by nearly 30%.

Last year, the AFA searched for a new editorial team to replace our exist-

ing team in 2016. Please congratulate our new JF Editor, Stefan Nagel, and

Co-Editors Philip Bond, Amit Seru, and Wei Xiong. We would like to acknowl-

edge and thank Ken Singleton, Bruno Biais, and Michael Roberts for their

outstanding job.

The Board approved a new Women’sInitative at the June board meeting. The

purpose of this Initiative is to promote the advancement of women academics

in the field of finance. The group, now known as the Academic Female Finance

Committee or AFFECT, hosted a reception to officially launch the organization

at the annual meeting. Thanks are due to Ren´

ee Adams and Michelle Lowry

for leading this effort.

Campbell Harvey,the 2016 Program Chair, thanked the 74 session chairs for

their work in selecting papers and discussants. The program consisted of 251

papers which were selected from 1,595 submissions (which is just under a 6%

decrease from the record number of submissions received the previous year).

The acceptance rate was 15.7%. The acceptance rate was higher this year in

large part due to the addition of 18 sessions to the AFA allotment.

In addition to the submitted-paper sessions the AFA also hosted five invited

sessions. A panel session titled “Is the Refereeing Process Broken? Perspec-

tives of Top-Journal Editors” was chaired by David Hirshleifer and was a joint

DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12428

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