Michael Weber, assistant professor of Finance and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, won a pair of awards from the European Finance Association. His paper, titled “Nominal Rigidities and Asset Pricing,” was named UBS Best Conference Paper and European Finance Association Best Doctoral Student Conference Paper. This made history as it was the first time a doctoral paper won the Conference Paper Prize.
“The awards are a great recognition and it feels fabulous that the most esteemed colleagues in the profession recognize and value my work,” Weber said.
In his paper, Weber examined the effects that having rigid output prices have on firm risk. He found that infrequent adjustments can lead to higher returns because of greater volatility.
“Price stickiness therefore has real costs for firms; it increases the cost of capital, and firms might forgo profitable investment projects,” Weber writes. “The frequency of product-price adjustment is a simple variable at the firm level that can account for a considerable part of the variation in firms’ exposure to systematic risk.”
“Nominal Rigidities and Asset Pricing,” written while Weber was a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas Business School, also earned him a Top Finance Graduate Award 2014 from the Center for Financial Frictions and the Department of Finance at Copenhagen Business School, as well as the Best Ph.D. Student Paper Award at the FMA European Conference 2014.
Weber also won the AQR Insight Award 2013 for his paper “Conditional Risk Premia in Currency Markets and Other Asset Classes,” forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics, along with two co-authors from Berkeley.