By Deborah Leigh Wood
Kellogg School Assistant Professors of Finance
Christopher Polk and Todd Pulvino
recently received first place awards for "best paper,"
and Professor of Finance Costis
Skiadas earned a runner-up award for best paper from what
are considered the nation's three premier journals of finance:
The Journal of Finance Economics, The Journal
of Finance and The Review of Financial Studies.
"These are the three top finance journals,
so I'm especially delighted to see our faculty's excellent
research recognized by their professional peers," said
Michael J. Fishman, chair of the Finance Department at Kellogg.
Fishman also is an editor of The Review of Financial
Studies and a past winner of an award given by The
Journal of Finance.
Polk received the Jensen Prize for Corporate
Finance and Organizations from the Journal of Financial
Economics,
The $5,000 award is given annually to the best corporate paper
published in the Journal during the previous year.
Polk's paper, "Does diversification destroy
value: Evidence from the industry shocks," finds that
diversity does cause a reduction in shareholder value. Polk,
who specializes in the field of diversification, co-authored
the paper with Owen A. Lamont, associate professor of finance
at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Pulvino won a $10,000 Smith Breeden prize
for "Limited Arbitrage in Equity Markets," published
in The Journal of Finance.
Pulvino and his Harvard Business School co-authors,
Associate Professor Mark L. Mitchell and Assistant Professor
Erik Stafford, demonstrate why the Law of One Price, which
maintains that two identical securities should trade at the
same price, does not hold true in all situations.
Skiadas won $5,000 as runner-up of the Barclay
Global Investors Michael Brennan Prize for best paper
published
in The Review of Financial Studies. "An Isomorphism
between Asset Pricing Models with and without Linear Habit
Formation"
provides what Skiadas calls a "powerful new methodology"
that transforms any consumer-consumption model that doesn't
deal with habit formation into one that does. The new methodology,
he says, simplifies the literature on habit formation and
generates new solutions to the problem of consumption savings
and its impact on the economy.
