The Department is pleased to announce that Dr Ulf Axelson and one of its former PhD Finance students, Dr Peter Kondor have received the top awards for outstanding academic papers at the recent annual meeting of the American Finance Association in Atlanta, Georgia.
Dr Ulf Axelson's article won the Brattle Group Prize for the best corporate finance paper and Dr Peter Kondor's, which was written at LSE as part of his PhD thesis, won the Smith Breeden Prize, an award for the best paper in any area other than corporate finance. Both awards are among the most prestigious in the field.
Both published in the internationally-renowned Journal of Finance, the annual awards recognise the best article published in the journal over the past year. The winner is picked by the journal's associate editors.
Ulf Axelson's paper, Why are Buyouts Levered? The Financial Structure of Private Equity Funds, published in August 2009, was co-written with Per Strömberg, from Stockholm School of Economics, and Michael Weisbach, from Ohio State University.
'It's a theory about why the leveraged buyout fund has emerged as the dominant organisational form to finance private equity activity,' he explains. 'It is very exciting and encouraging to be recognised in this way by your colleagues in the profession.'
Peter Kondor, now Assistant Professor of Economics at the Central European University (CEU), wrote his paper, Risk in Dynamic Arbitrage: The Price Effects of Convergence Trading, as part of his PhD thesis under the supervision of LSE's Prof. Dimitri Vayanos. First drafted in 2006, the paper was finally published in April 2009.
'This is excellent news for the Department of Finance' said Head of Department, Prof. David Webb, 'it is further recognition that both the research undertaken by our faculty and the quality of our PhD programme are at the forefront in the field'.
The Brattle Group Prizes are awarded annually for outstanding papers on corporate finance. The winning papers are chosen by the Associate Editors of The Journal of Finance. The papers eligible for the prizes for a given year are all those that appeared in the first five issues of that year and in the December issue from the previous year. The prizes are awarded at the AFA's annual meeting by a representative of The Brattle Group, Inc.
The Smith Breeden Prizes are awarded annually for the top three papers in The Journal of Finance in any area other than corporate finance. The winning papers are chosen by the Associate Editors of The Journal of Finance. The papers eligible for the prizes for a given year are all those that appeared in the first five issues of that year and in the December issue from the previous year.