FRIC PhD student wins the 2016 SFI Outstanding Paper Award

The Center for Financial Frictions and the Department of Finance are very pleased to announce that PhD student Sven Klingler and his co-author Professor Suresh Sundaresan from Columbia Business School have been awarded the Swiss Finance Institute Outstanding Paper Award 2016 for their paper An Explanation of Negative Swap Spreads. Negative swap spreads represent a persistent pricing anomaly in financial markets. The paper suggests that the demand for duration hedging by underfunded pension plans is responsible for this anomaly.

The SFI Outstanding Paper Award includes a prize of CHF 15.000 to be shared by the authors, and the prize winners will be recognized during the Spring of 2017, where they will present their paper at a research seminar in Geneva.

- The prize is a remarkable achievement by Sven and an honor for FRIC. It is yet another proof of how strong the quality of the PhD candidates in finance has become at CBS. Sven is one example among several of our students who develop co-authorships with leading professors when they go abroad as part of their studies. They can only do this because they are creative, well-trained and hard-working, says director of the FRIC center Professor David Lando, who also serves as Sven’s PhD advisor.

SFI annually awards a prize for an unpublished research paper circulated over the previous 12 months that makes an outstanding contribution to the field of finance. Previous winners of the Outstanding Paper Award also include FRIC members Annette Vissing-Jørgensen (2015), professor at University of California Berkeley;  Lasse Heje Pedersen (2011), professor at Copenhagen Business School; and Susan Christoffersen (2005), professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and Copenhagen Business School.

For more information about the prize and the previous winners, please see the SFI website here.