Morgan Stanley – American Finance Association Award for Excellence in Finance

The Award
AFA has established a new biannual finance award to be granted based on an individual’s career achievements in outstanding thought leadership in the field of financial economics. The Award will be granted by the AFA beginning in 2008 and continuing for five biannual periods. There shall only be one recipient of the Award in any biannual period.

Award Criteria
AFA shall be solely responsible for the selection of the Award Recipient using the following selection criteria:

Selection of Award Winner
At its annual meeting the Executive Committee of the AFA will nominate and the AFA Board will approve a selection committee, to be chaired by the outgoing President. The committee will evaluate candidates for the award based on the impact of the candidates’ research along several dimensions.

  • Fundamental Impact. Fundamental research opens new areas to inquiry, changes scholars’, practitioners’, and regulators’ thinking about basic problems, or develops new tools that make academic and practical research progress possible.
  • Sustained Impact. The candidates’ activities should have a cumulative impact through the course of a career, and continuing influence on current research.
  • Broad Impact. The most important research contributions are likely to be widely understood and appreciated across multiple subfields, to influence subsequent research, practice, and pedagogy, and to alter the course of empirical and theoretical inquiry.

Award Winners:

Stewart C. Myers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016

Stephen A. Ross, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014

Douglas W. Diamond, University of Chicago, 2012

Michael C. Jensen, Harvard Business School, 2010

Eugene F. Fama, University of Chicago, 2008

Award Prize
The AFA, with the financial support of Morgan Stanley (http://www.morganstanley.com), shall provide each Award Recipient a gift in the amount of Two Hundred Thousand Dollars ($200,000), such gift to be made to an eligible institution in support of research activities in the financial field of the Award Recipient’s choosing. An institution is eligible to receive the Award Prize if such charity is a recognized 501c-3 charity (or the equivalent for non-US charities). The Award Prize will be made by Morgan Stanley in the name of the Award Recipient as follows: [Award Recipient name] as a recipient of the Morgan Stanley – American Financial Association Award for Excellence in Finance.