Top Finance Graduate Award at HEC Paris

HEC Paris is proud to host the 2024 Top Finance Graduate Award Conference on 15 May 2024. This award recognizes the most promising PhD candidates in financial economics worldwide, graduating in 2024. The scientific committee selects the candidates with the greatest promise to have a long-term impact on our understanding of finance, regardless of their field of study. This award has been hosted since 2023 at HEC Paris and is the successor to the AQR Top Finance Graduate Award, hosted between 2013 and 2022 at Copenhagen Business School.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE SIX WINNERS OF 2024!

In randomized order:

Jacob Conway: PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University
Naz Koont: PhD candidate in Finance at Columbia Business School
Taisiya Sikorskaya: PhD Candidate in Finance at London Business School
Tim De Silva: PhD candidate in Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management
Leland Bybee: PhD candidate in Financial Economics at the Yale School of Management
Julia Selgrad: PhD candidate in Finance at the NYU Stern School of Business

Jacob Conway

Jacob Conway is a PhD candidate at Stanford University. His research interests include corporate finance and industrial organization, with a focus on the causes and consequences of firms engaging with social, political, and environmental issues. Prior to Stanford, he worked as a research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and earned bachelor's degrees in Economics, Mathematics, and Statistics from the University of Chicago.

Naz Koont 

Naz Koont is a PhD candidate in Finance at Columbia Business School. Her research studies how new technologies and the emergence of nonbank intermediaries are changing the banking landscape, and the implications for financial stability, competition, and welfare. Naz will join Stanford GSB as an Assistant Professor of Finance in July 2024.

Taisiya Sikorskaya

Taisiya Sikorskaya is a PhD Candidate in Finance at London Business School. She will join the University of Chicago Booth School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Finance in the summer of 2024. Her research explores the impact of institutional investors on asset prices, retail trading in options, and limits to arbitrage. She has published in the Journal of Finance and the Review of Financial Studies, and her work has been cited in international media, including Bloomberg and The Economist. Prior to London Business School, Taisiya worked in Asset Management in Switzerland and the UK. She completed her MA in Quantitative Economics and Finance at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) and MSc in Operations Research at Chelyabinsk State University (Russia).

Tim De Silva

Tim de Silva is a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research interests include household finance, macro-finance, and public finance. Prior to attending MIT, Tim received a Bachelor’s degree in Financial Economics and Applied Mathematics from Claremont McKenna College, worked in volatility research at Analytic Investors, and worked in Equity Derivatives Sales and Trading at Morgan Stanley.

Leland Bybee

Leland is a PhD candidate in financial economics at the Yale School of Management and will join the Chicago Booth School of Business as an assistant professor of finance this summer.  Much of his work leverages machine learning and natural language processing to address key questions in economics and finance.  His current focus is on developing measures of beliefs with applications to asset pricing and behavioral economics.  Before Yale, Leland received a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Michigan and completed an undergraduate degree in economics at the University of Chicago.

 Julia Selgrad     

Julia Selgrad is a PhD candidate in Finance at the NYU Stern School of Business. Her research interests include macro-finance, monetary policy, financial intermediation, and asset pricing. Before her graduate studies, she received a Bachelor's degree in Economics and Management from the University of Oxford. In July 2024, she will join the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Finance.                                   

The winners will share a cash prize of 10.000 USD and present their research at HEC Paris on May 15, 2024.
 
Selection procedure: The selection committee and all previous winners of the Top Finance Graduate Award were invited to nominate candidates for the award. The committee discussed individually all the nominees and made a final selection of six winners. Note that candidates cannot apply for this award.

•    Jean-Edouard Colliard (co-chair), HEC Paris
•    Darrell Duffie, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business
•    Steven Kaplan, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
•    Augustin Landier (co-chair), HEC Paris
•    Toby Moskowitz, Yale University, School of Management
•    Anna Pavlova, London Business School
•    David S. Scharfstein, Harvard Business School
•    David Thesmar, MIT Sloan School of Management

Registration is by invitation only. Please write to colliard@hec.fr if you would like to attend this event. The detailed program is available here.