The Centre for Analytical Finance (CAF) at ISB held its annual flagship Summer Research Conference (SRC) in finance recently at the Hyderabad campus. This year the event was special, as SRC celebrated its tenth anniversary and the finest minds in finance helped celebrate this with a three-day session on “Recent Advances in Corporate Finance.”

Each year, the centre invites a finance researcher of the highest scholarly standing as its Academic Fellow. The Academic Fellow interacts with the resident faculty in research and delivers the keynote address at the SRC. Professor Eduardo Schwartz from the UCLA Anderson School of Management is CAF Academic Fellow 2013. Professor Schwartz, known for pioneering research in derivatives, spoke on “The Real Options Approach to Valuation: Challenges and Opportunities” in his keynote address.

In the last decade, several stalwarts in finance have added the sparkle to SRC as CAF Academic Fellows including Franklin Allen (2005), an expert in corporate finance; Richard Roll(2006), best known for his work on portfolio theory and asset pricing; Raghuram Rajan (2007), Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and the person instrumental in setting up CAF at ISB; Michael Brennan(2008), a pioneer of real options theory; Ravi Jagannathan (2009), the advocate of “conditional capital asset pricing model”; Sheridan Titman (2010), an expert in investments and corporate finance, Anjan Thakor (2011), an expert in Corporate finance, financial intermediation and economics of asymmetric information and Douglas Diamond (2012), who specializes in the study of financial intermediaries, financial crises, and liquidity.

Over the years, the conference has become extremely competitive, with paper submissions from almost 20 countries. The the acceptance rate of the research papers presented at the conference to top journals is one of the best at 27.2%.

The papers have featured topics such as financial crisis, family business and emerging markets, banking and credit risk, mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance and alternative investments.

The centre has strengthened the research focus of ISB by working on several policy projects of national importance. Today, it is one of the leading research and consulting experts on global financial issues.

For more details on CAFand the SRC please visit http://www.isb.edu/centre-for-analytical-finance