March 1-3, 2018, Melbourne

The Department of Finance in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne is pleased to continue its annual conference series: Finance Down Under: Building on the Best from the Cellars of Finance, March 1-3, 2018.

OVERVIEW: We invite submissions that embody the best in current empirical and theoretical research. We welcome papers in corporate finance, asset pricing, and all other areas of finance. The conference selection committee includes eminent scholars in every facet of finance. With the help of the selection committee, we strive to provide a conference program that is internationally renowned for excellent presentations, discussions, and keynote speeches.

Each year, we honour 'vintage' work in finance that has inspired recent advances and withstood the test of time. In 2018, we will celebrate "The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration" by Professors Sanford Grossman and Oliver Hart. We are honoured to have Professor Oliver Hart (2016 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences), Professor James Mirrlees (1996 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences) and Professor Per Stromberg as keynote speakers.

In addition to the conference sessions, participants are invited to a half-day tour of the local wine country following the Saturday morning session as well as a conference wine reception. Where optimal, discussants will be selected from the set of submitters of great papers that cannot be accommodated within the program.

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: The deadline for paper submissions is midnight EST September 30, 2017. Papers should be submitted electronically on the SSRN conference website. Complete instructions for submission and other information can be found at: https://hq.ssrn.com/conference=Finance-Down-Under-2018.

Papers will be reviewed by three members of the conference selection committee, and authors of selected papers will be notified by early November 2017. For further questions, please contact our conference coordinator, Karen Davis, at:  fdu-conference@unimelb.edu.au.

AWARDS:
- Best Paper Award, with a prize of A$4,000.

- The CFAM-ARX Award.  Jointly sponsored by the CFA Society of Melbourne (CFAM) and the Asia-Pacific Research Exchange of the CFA Institute (ARX), this award will be presented, with a prize of A$1,500, to a paper that has relevance to the Asia-Pacific region. To be considered for this award, papers must be uploaded to the ARX website (https://www.arx.cfa/). Details for this submission will be provided on the SSRN conference website.

We hope that you can join us in 2018 in delightful late-summer Melbourne.

FDU ORGANISING COMMITTEE:
Ali Akyol, Andre Gygax, Federico Nardari and Qi Zeng
Department of Finance
Faculty of Business & Economics
The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 AUSTRALIA