Congratulations to the officers and directors elected in the AFA 2019 election:
- President: Kenneth Singleton,
- President Elect and 2021 Program Chair: John Graham,
- Vice President: Laura Starks,
- Directors: Ralph Koijen, Gordon Phillips, Manju Puri
Congratulations to the officers and directors elected in the AFA 2019 election:
The 2019 AFA elections are currently underway. All regular members of the AFA were sent an email with a link to candidate bios and a ballot. If you did not receive your ballot, please email Noelle MacDonald at nmacdonald@wiley.com. Note: Student Members and Worldwide Directory of Finance members without a paid membership are not eligible to vote.
The AFA 2020 Annual Meeting will be held January 3-5, 2020 (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) in San Diego, California.
This year the AFA will again host a Ph.D. Student Poster Session as part of the Annual Meeting. The AFA will also award Travel Grants to doctoral students to help defray the costs of attending our 2020 Annual Meeting, which will be held in San Diego, California on January 3-5, 2020. Details on both programs can be found on the Annual Meeting page of the AFA website.
NOTE: These programs are administered separately. You are not required to have a paper or poster on the program in order to receive a travel grant.
We are very saddened to report that Mark Rubinstein, one of the preeminent financial economists of our time, died after a prolonged and difficult illness on May 9th at his home in Marin.
Mark was a past president and inaugural Fellow of the AFA. Prior to becoming emeritus, he was the Paul Stephens Professor of Applied Investment Analysis at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard, an MBA from Stanford, and his Ph.D. from UCLA.
Mark is best known for his fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of derivatives pricing. He developed the theory of binomial option pricing in his joint work with John Cox and Steve Ross, and introduced methods for evaluating exotic derivative securities and for deriving implied binomial trees from options prices. His text, Options Markets, with John Cox, made option pricing theory accessible to a wide audience. His early work also played a key role in developing the foundations of modern asset pricing, including the role of state prices, conditions for aggregation, and the precursors to the consumption-based CAPM.
Mark, together with his U.C. Berkeley colleague Hayne E. Leland, developed the concept of portfolio insurance as a financial product in 1976. His influence on practice is evidenced by numerous awards, including Financial Engineer of the Year (International Association of Financial Engineers) and Fortune’s Businessman of the Year.
Mark was an avid student of intellectual history, and captured his many insights in the book, A History of the Theory of Investments: My Annotated Bibliography (Wiley, 2006). He spent the last years of his life working on articles on the development of early Christianity.
Mark will be missed by the many in our field he touched with his wide-ranging intellectual contributions, his enthusiastic curiosity, and his unique and open perspective.