Please submit your paper/poster by July 31.
In 2027, the AFA will again plan to host a PhD Student Poster Session. Travel Grants will be provided to PhD students with a paper in the AFA PhD Student Poster Session to defray the costs of attending our 2027 Annual Meeting, scheduled for January 3-5, 2027 in Washington, D.C.
Find additional details on the Annual Meeting page of the AFA website.
The following authors were selected as the inaugural recipients of the AFA Future of Finance Award for their papers listed below which will be presented in a Special Session at the 2027 AFA Annual Meeting.
The Future of Finance Award and Special Session recognizes those who have written a paper that is both innovative and creative, and that challenges existing approaches in financial economics. These criteria include novel methodology (including theory and econometrics) and interdisciplinary approaches.
Papers were selected from among those submitted to the AFA Annual Meeting whose authors opted-in for consideration. Papers with an author who received their PhD more than 6 years prior were ineligible for consideration.
Renee Adams and Michelle Lowry were awarded the Denis Gromb Award for Outstanding Citizenship in Financial Economics, awarded by the Financial Intermediation Research Society (FIRS), in recognition of their founding of AFFECT (Academic Female Finance Committee). AFFECT is a subcommittee of the American Finance Association, which promotes gender equality in academic finance through research, mentoring, and networking. Founded in 2015, the goal was to advance both science and women’s participation in science, and today AFFECT’s initiatives and best practices have influenced many aspects of the profession. The award is named in memory of Denis Gromb, an extraordinary colleague and human being who gave his time and energy to others with exceptional warmth and generosity — and who embodied the spirit of citizenship that this award celebrates.
With the rapid advancement of generative AI tools and their increasing use in finance research, fundamental questions are emerging about how research will be conducted and assessed going forward. Perspectives vary widely. Some emphasize the pace of technological progress and the possibility that AI could play an increasingly central role in the research process. Others are more cautious and view AI primarily as a tool for mostly well-defined tasks. A more realistic view likely lies between these positions. The research process involves elements such as taste, judgment, values, and intuition, which are not supposed to be delegated to machines. At the same time, the growing capabilities of AI tools suggest that they can play a meaningful and productive role if used thoughtfully. Finally, value tends to accrue to what is relatively scarce, and our systems for evaluating research should adapt to shifts in the relative scarcity of different inputs to and outputs from the research process.
In this context, the profession would benefit from more systematic evidence on what AI systems can produce in a research setting. A clearer understanding of this frontier helps guide the responsible use of these tools and clarify the nature of scholarly contribution. Against this backdrop, we invite submissions to a special session at the 2027 AFA Annual Meeting aimed at showcasing and evaluating the capabilities of AI in finance research, and based on that evidence, reflecting on appropriate norms for their use and the unique aspects of human contribution. Our objective is not to frame the question in terms of replacement, but rather to better understand where AI tools/agents are most effective within the research process and how they can be combined with human insight to enhance research outcomes.
We invite submissions that are predominantly generated by AI. Authors should submit entirely new projects in which AI systems play a systematic role beyond modular, tool-like functions such as variable construction or analytical assistance. We are particularly interested in work where AI contributes across multiple stages of the research process, with limited human involvement. Authors are required to document their initial inputs, data access, model configuration, and full workflow. Submissions will be evaluated by human reviewers using standard academic criteria, including the novelty and importance of the research question, the incremental contribution to the literature, and the quality of execution. In addition, this session will place specific emphasis on the extent to which the research process is carried out by AI systems, with limited human intervention.
From the submission pool, four papers will be selected for presentation in the special session based on both the research contribution and the design and effectiveness of AI use in the workflow. The expectation is not zero human involvement after the initial prompt, but the highest possible research quality per unit of human expertise and effort. In addition, all high-quality submissions will be included in an AFA 2027 online collection to provide a broad view of current AI capabilities across multiple dimensions.
Human discussants will be explicitly tasked with assessing both scientific merit and the nature of human labor embodied in each paper. They will also articulate what AI-generated finance research lacks relative to the profession’s current standards of originality and excellence. These discussions are intended to inform a broader conversation about how evaluation standards should evolve in response to ongoing technological advances.
The organizers will not use non-public information from the submission and review process for their own research. This initiative is intended as a public forum rather than a setting for data collection.
The ground rules for paper submissions are as follows:
These rules intentionally leave authors wide latitude in how to structure the workflow, and in which tasks the humans adopt given their constrained time. Indeed, this variation is exactly the object of the exploration. The ideal paper is not one with no human involvement, but with maximal quality per unit of human effort.
Submission can be made through the AFA website here.
Organizers:
Itay Goldstein (Wharton School)
Wei Jiang (Goizueta Business School; Session Chair)
Robert Novy-Marx (Simon Graduate School of Business)
William Mann (Goizueta Business School)
We hope you will join us on May 7 at 1:00 pm (Eastern Time) for a one-hour webinar of the 2025 First Prize Brattle Group Prize winning paper:
Julia Fonseca and Lu Liu for Mortgage Lock‐In, Mobility, and Labor Reallocation.
The webinar will be hosted by Thomas Philippon, Editor of the Journal of Finance, and Shastri Sandy from The Brattle Group. A short paper presentation will be followed by Q&A from the hosts and the audience.
Register and join the webinar with this link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NO6qD2oxQfOaSj9cqxfJ7w