The First LSE Finance PhD Alumni Event, 18-19 June 2026

The Department of Finance welcomed alumni, faculty members and current PhD students to the first LSE Finance PhD Alumni Event, held on 18-19 June 2026. This event celebrated the department's doctoral community and provided an opportunity to reconnect, share research and strengthen professional networks across generations of Finance PhD graduates.

The event commenced on the evening of 18 June with a reception where alumni and faculty reconnected with former colleagues and students, while current PhD candidates had the opportunity to engage with graduates pursuing successful careers in academia and industry.

On 19 June, Professor Daniel Paravisini, PhD Programme Director, welcomed attendees and reflected on the continued strength and achievements of the Finance PhD community. The day featured presentations by PhD alumni covering a range of topics in financial economics, banking and financial markets.

Bernardo Ricca opened the academic programme with “Competing for Loan Informal Seniority”, which uses administrative data on household credit in Brazil to analyse how lenders compete for repayment priority using contract terms, thus generating distortions that challenge standard debt dilution effects. The theme of how contract design shapes outcomes carried into the next presentation.

Jason Donaldson’s “Modular Contracts” began from the observation that real-world contracts are written as collections of clauses that courts evaluate separately; the paper develops a formal theory of contractual language explaining how modular clauses can rationally determine outcomes such as loopholes, complexity risk, contractual landmines, incompleteness, and evidentiary conservatism.

Shifting to financial markets, Lorenzo Bretscher’s “Rethinking Volume: Has the Market Become More Liquid?” examined how market liquidity has evolved over the past four decades; the study finds that, while short-term liquidity has improved due to high-frequency trading, long-term liquidity, measured by price impact and mean reversion, has remained largely unchanged.

The final two papers examined how households allocate funds across financial products. Nicola Limodio’s “Household Portfolio and Deposit Insurance” used a natural experiment in India to show that higher deposit insurance coverage leads households to shift funds from risky assets like stocks and mutual funds into bank deposits.

The final paper, Matteo Benetton’s “Deposit Competition Beyond Rates”, used novel data on bank marketing campaigns to show that sign-up bonuses, direct mail marketing volume, and targeted advertising are the primary channel through which interest rate changes affect deposit competition, suggesting that adverse selection rather than market power explains the gap between the value of a typical depositor and the bonus paid by banks.

The presentations generated lively discussions among the alumni, faculty and doctoral students, creating opportunities for intellectual exchange and fostering new connections within the Finance research community. The programme also included an update from Professor Amil Dasgupta, Director of the Financial Markets Group (FMG), who outlined current developments and future initiatives within the research centre. The event concluded with a dinner at Coopers Restaurant.

The inaugural Finance PhD Alumni Event was a genuine success, bringing together members of the Finance PhD community from across different cohorts and career stages, from recent graduates to established academics and practitioners. The event demonstrated the lasting strength of the department's alumni network and established a foundation for future alumni events.