On December 13 and 14, The Marshall School of Business hosted the first annual Conference on Finance, Organizations and Markets, bringing academic thought leaders together at USC’s Popovich Hall. The event allowed for scholars representing universities and leading institutions across the world to share their research and gain feedback from others.
“The conference was interdisciplinary, bringing together scholars from economics, organizations and finance departments. Scholars attended from domestic institutions including Columbia, MIT, Northwestern, NYU and Stanford, and internationally from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain and Universidad de Los Andes in Chile,” said conference organizer Gordon Phillips, a professor of finance and business economics at Marshall.
Marshall is the first stop for this rotating conference—the event will be held at a different university each year and marks the conclusion of a year of interactions between members of the Finance, Organizations and Markets (FOM) Research Group. FOM is dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary research in finance and the organization of firms and markets.
At the conference, authors explained their research in seminars and then opened the floor up to questions from other participants. Additionally, this year’s assembly featured a keynote address by Robert Gibbons, the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and professor of organizational economics at MIT. Gibbons covered topics including CEO compensation, private equity, technological investment and labor outcomes, and the impact of acquisitions on a company’s productivity and profitability.
