Finance conference draws blue-chip experts

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This article was published 03/04/2019 (2472 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Thursday’s second Quadrant Behavioural Finance Conference at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, organized and hosted by the Asper School of Business, is not going to cause all the downtown hotels to fill up.

But the prestigious academic finance conference is becoming a signature event for the Asper School, leveraging the school’s research specialization in human behaviour.

The academic conference is bringing in experts in the field from around the world, including one of the founders of behavioural finance research, Meir Statman from Santa Clara University, as well as no less than five officials from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia who are presenting a paper titled “The Financial Consequences of Identity Theft: Evidence from Consumer Credit Bureau Records.”

Gady Jacoby, dean of the Asper School, said, “One of my strategic goals is to enhance the research reputation of the school, and the best way to do that is to capitalize on our current strength, which is in behavioural management.”

That’s not just in the area of finance, but also includes management, human resources and consumer behaviour.

Including Statman from Santa Clara and the officials from Philadelphia, leading academic experts presenting at the conference will be coming from as far away as the University of Mannheim in Germany, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Tsinghua University in Beijing and from universities across the U.S.

The event’s lead sponsor is Quadrant Private Wealth, a Winnipeg private wealth manager, which has also encouraged sponsorship from a handful of prestigious Canadian portfolio managers.

Murray Palay, executive chairman and portfolio manager at Quadrant, said he’s happy to help the Asper School create a prestigious event like this to help grow its own name and reputation.

“Universities in other cities have these types of people come to speak to classes and faculty and students all the time. But Winnipeg is not on the radar,” he said. “But why not Winnipeg? Most people don’t realize that, other than the banks, the largest base of head offices for financial institutions (in Canada) is here.”

The conference is to be held here every two years and Jacoby said the first one has inspired a lot of research from Asper faculty and PhD students into behavioural management studies.

“My goal is to leverage this strength in order to push the reputation of the school,” Jacoby said. “So, in the future the plan is to have not just a behavioural finance research conference, sponsored by Quadrant, but also to have an annual behavioural management conference.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca