Kellogg Associate Professor Wins Award For Best Published Paper
The following article was originally sourced from the piece “Investing In People” on Kellogg’s News & Events page.
Assistant Professor of Finance Dimitris Papanikolaou of the Kellogg School of Management was awarded the 2013 Smith Breeden Prize for best paper of the year in the Journal of Finance, the world’s principal journal for financial research.
According to Kellogg Finance Department Chair Kathleen Hagerty, the Journal of Finance receives roughly 1,300 submissions a year with only 5-percent of those submissions accepted for publication. Of these, only one wins the Smith Breeden.
“Only outstanding research is published in the Journal of Finance and to be named the best paper among that elite group of papers is impressive,” Hagerty said.
The winning paper, which Papanikolaou co-authored with Andrea Eisfeldt of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, relates historic returns of companies that invest in their people to those that don’t.
The paper among one of the first scholarly articles to examine organizational capital in a market sense, turning the intangible value of the best executives, sharpest managers and savviest engineers into dollars and cents for investors.
“People that work for a particular firm, they add some value to the firm, to the shareholders,” he said. “They don’t necessarily get paid all the value they’re adding; there’s some surplus that’s created.”
“The tricky part is the surplus can disappear if your best assets walk out the door.”
