Minutes of the 2020 Annual Membership Meeting

• Date: 01 April 2020
• Published date: 01 April 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12886

THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE •VOL. LXXV, NO. 2 •APRIL 2020

AMERICAN FINANCE ASSOCIATION

Minutes of the 2020 Annual Membership Meeting

The Eightieth Annual Membership Meeting was held at the San Diego Man-

chester Grand Hyatt on January 4, 2020 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 2019 election were announced as follows:

rPresident: Kenneth Singleton

rPresident Elect: John Graham

rVice President: Laura Starks

rDirectors: Ralph Koijen, Gordon Phillips, Manju Puri

The Association thanks outgoing Directors for their service: Wei Jiang,

Mitchell Petersen, Toni Whited, as well as past President David Scharfstein.

EST Schallheim reported that the Association’s financial condition is excel-

lent (see his report in this issue for details). Totalmembership numbers showed

a 7% increase from 2018 to 2019 with total membership at nearly 12,000.

EST Schallheim mentioned two of the actions undertaken by the AFA in

2019. First, the AFA negotiated a five-year extension of its publishing contract

with Wiley. Second, this past year the AFA engaged the services of an AFA

Ombudsperson. Francine Montemurro is the first AFA Ombuds. She has over

20 years’ experience as a practicing Ombuds, most recently at Boston Univer-

sity. Francine was available at the meetings to meet in person with interested

parties and is available by email during the year.

President David Hirshleifer thanked the many members of AFA committees

for their tireless work in 2019. President Hirshleifer also thanked Ren´

ee Adams

and Michelle Lowry for their pioneering efforts on behalf of AFFECT and Bryan

Routledge for his help with the AFA website and other IT matters.

President-Elect Kenneth Singleton, the 2020 Program Chair, thanked the

paper authors and the 75 session chairs for their work in selecting papers and

discussants. The program consisted of 241 papers (236 regular submissions and

5 were solicited by AFA Session Chairs), with the 236 regular program papers

selected from 1,838 submissions (which is down from 2,071 the previous year).

The acceptance rate was 13.1%.

President-Elect Singleton also reported on some further statistics. For ses-

sion chairs, 25% were female. Approximately 22% of papers where theoretical

DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12886

C2020 the American Finance Association

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