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New Head of School
 Prof Chris Adam has been appointed as the new Head of School for Banking and Finance since September 2006. He was serving as the Head of Accounting and Finance Cluster in the AGSM before the appointment. Prof Adam has extensive teaching experience on MBA and Executive Programs. His research interests include international corporate finance, financial strategy, exchange rate economics and financial intermediaries.
Prof Terry Walter’s Farewell Function
 On the 1st of September 2006, staff of the School of Banking and Finance gathered to bid farewell to Terry and wish him well on his appointment as Division Head of Business and Humanities at UNSW Asia. Also present at the function were Terry’s family (Lesley, Amelia and Tim, Belinda, Charlotte). Professor John Pigott, Acting Dean, paid tribute to Terry’s many contributions to the School of Banking and Finance and Faculty of Commerce and Economics. Toan Pham went down memory lane and related glimpses of Terry’s decades of achievements in research, mentoring of younger colleagues and supervision of research students. Terry’s earlier publications in the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis place him in the same league as Philip Brown, Ray Ball and Bob Officer as pioneers of financial research in this country. Since 2002 Terry has served as Head of School of Banking and Finance and under his leadership this School has progressed to become the premier centre of teaching and research in finance in Australasia. The evening was capped by Stephanie Osborne’s solo vocal performance of "Pokarekare Ana" (a worldwide farewell song) to wish Terry and his family the very best in the next phase of his career.
Prof Terry Walter's farewell function photograph album.
Visiting Academic
 Prof Avner Kalay is visiting the School for two weeks from 25 September 2006. He will conduct a FIRN seminar of Current Topics in Finance for PhD students and younger researchers at 9:30am, 26th September 2006 in the Quadrangle Building, level 2, room 2063. The seminar is based on the 2006 Utah Winter Finance Conference (UWFC). The ten papers that will be presented and discussed are those accepted to the UWFC out of a pool of 164 submissions. UWFC has a joint submission process with the Review of Financial Studies. It is already clear that, in all likelihood, four of the presented papers will be published in the RFS.
The purpose of the seminar is to provide participants with an up to date review of top tier research. In addition, participants will receive personal feedback and advice on their presentation performance. Please feel free to stop by Avner's office located in the School of Banking and Finance, Quadrangle Building, room 3075 (extension 55570) and discuss with him about your research ideas, thoughts, and plans.
Prof Avner Kalay’s Curriculum Vitae and the FIRN seminar flyer.
 Dr Sheila O'Donohoe visited the School from 1 July 2006 to 31 August 2006. Sheila had also presented a paper on "Shareholders Returns in Domestic and Cross Border Acquisitions: Empirical Evidence from the UK in the Fifth Merger Wave" on 27 July 2006.
Best Paper Awards
Congratulations to Khamis Al-Yahyaee, Toan Pham and Terry Walter. Their paper entitled "Ex-Dividend Day Behaviour in the Absence of Taxes and Price Discreteness" was awarded the Institute of Finance Professional New Zealand Inc. best paper at the recent Asian FA/FMA Conference held in Auckland NZ between 10-12 July 2006. In this paper the authors show that the ex-dividend day anomaly (that the drop in price on the ex-day is less than the dividend) is present in daily returns, even in a nation in which there are no taxes on dividends or capital gains. However, as soon as the microstructure of the market is incorporated into the research methodology, the ex-dividend anomaly completely disappears.
 Congratulations to Kingsley Fong, David Gallagher, Peter Gardner and Peter L. Swan. Their paper entitled
“Leading the Herd to Greener Pastures: When Trade Imitation is the Most “Profitable” Form of Flattery”
was one of 700 submissions to the European Financial Management Association (EFMA) Conference held in
Madrid recently.
It was presented by Peter Gardner and was awarded the Best Paper Prize. This is the second time that this paper
has been awarded such a prize.
Publications
Congratulations to Prof Mike Aitken on his paper being accepted by the Journal of Financial Markets. His paper entitled “Liquidity Supply in Electronic Markets” is co-authored with Niall Almedia, Rick Harris and Tom McInish.
Congratulations to Jerry Parwada on the acceptance of his paper entitled "The Genesis of Home Bias? The Location and Portfolio Choices of Investment Company Start-Ups" by the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
January 2, 2006
Donghui Li, Fariborz Moshirian, Pascal Nguyen and Tim Wee have been accepted for publication in the forthcoming Journal of Risk and Insurance for their paper entitled ‘Demand for Life Insurance in the OECD countries’ . This journal is published by the US insurance association and is the top journal in the area of financial and insurance services. Tim was an MCom (Hons) student who wrote a thesis on risk and insurance under Donghui's and Fari's guidance. Congratulations to all.
January 6, 2006
Congratulations to Luke Bayley, Phillip Lee and Terry Walter on the acceptance of their paper entitled ‘IPO Flipping in Australia: Cross Sectional Explanations’ for publication in the forthcoming Pacific Basin Finance Journal. Phillip Lee is at The University of Sydney and Luke Bayley is a PhD student in Accounting being jointly supervised by Terry and Stephen Taylor.
August, 2006
Congratulations to David Colwell. His paper in conjunction with Oh Kang Kwon from Sydney University and Nadima El-Hassan from UTS on "Hedging Diffusion Processes by Local Risk-Minimization with Applications to Index Tracking" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.
The Finance Alumni Network
A unique professional development and networking opportunity exclusively for graduates of Commerce and Economics.
Benefits of membership of the Finance Network Alumni include:
- Future Meet the CEO series and Meet the CFO series
- Newsletters and access to School Research and Working Papers
- Golf Networking Day and invitations to other sponsored events
- Access to School staff for consulting and research
- Discounted registration at Australasian Finance and Banking Conference
Contact our Finance Alumni Coordinator and register your interest by emailing financealumni@unsw.edu.au (please provide your name, contact and company details) or by telephoning 02 9385 5858.
Australasian Finance & Banking Conference
The School of Banking & Finance at the University of New South Wales will hold its 20th Australasian Finance and Banking Conference in Sydney at the Shangri-La Hotel on 12th, 13th and 14th December 2007.
Please don’t hesitate to email: Conference Administration if you require further information.
Student Competitions
2006 UBS Investment Banking Challenge – May 2006 - UNSW team takes first prize
Four students from UNSW won first place in the 2006 UBS Investment Banking Challenge National Final in which students were asked to perform the role of investment banking advisors to San Miguel on their purchase of National Foods. The team, Synergy Inc., consisting of Udai Chopra, Stuart Mackie, Ross Eaton and Jayde Whiteman beat the winning teams from the Universities of Melbourne (2nd place), Queensland (3rd place), Western Australia (4th place) and Sydney (5th place). The competition was judged by Ben Keeble, Joel Denney and Aidan Allen, all senior executives at UBS Investment Bank, and Peter Yates from Alco Equity Partners. The judging panel said “we were extremely impressed with the output from all five teams”. It is a testament to UNSW competitors’ efforts that they came out in front. A total of 142 teams entered the 2006 Challenge and 38% of the participants were from UNSW. Synergy Inc. won $5,000 for their success.
School Research Seminars
Seminar Series are held weekly. Inquiries to Dr Henry Yip.
WebCT
All of the School course information can be accessed through WebCT.
A/Prof Toan Pham's Retirement
Originally from Vietnam, Toan came to Australia at end of 1962 under a Colombo Plan scholarship. After some months of intensive English tuition in Sydney he was sent to the University of Tasmania where he qualified for a BEc (Hons). Then a small university with a student population of about 900, it was a close-knit, village-like community. Without realising it, he was picked up at Hobart Airport by the Vice Chancellor of the University. It was the beginning of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, naturally there was ‘intense and curious’ interest in Vietnam and Vietnamese.
Toan’s introduction to finance was largely accidental. In 1974 he was employed as an RA for the Professor of Finance, Rex Olsson, in the School of Accountancy at UNSW. His task was to collect financial news in the press and find books/documents (mostly in financial institutions) in the main library. He was offered an opportunity to teach a first-year finance course (the antecedent of FINS1613 nowadays). Till then he had never studied finance. Rex Olsson then gave him 3 books to initiate his learning: The Theory of Finance (Fama and Miller, 1972), Portfolio Selection (Markowitz, 1959) and The Theory of Risk Bearing (Arrow, 1971). Later on, when he was asked to teach an Honours Finance course, fortunately another Fama book was available (Foundations of Finance, 1976) and a special issue of Journal of Financial Economics on Option Pricing (1976) appeared. These two volumes then formed the contents of the Honours finance course. To Toan, stochastic calculus was a new subject matter. He sought help from Carl Chiarella who introduced him to a book by Karl Agstrom, Introduction to Stochastic Control Theory (1970). In sum, Toan’s education in finance was self-taught and in the beginning was based upon these books. In the general academic environment of the early 1970s, Finance was largely unknown and in Toan's recollection of those days there were only four Australian academics with PhDs in Finance: Rex Olsson (NYU), Philip Brown (Chicago), Ray Ball (Chicago) and Bob Officer (Chicago) with the last three still working in the USA.
The 1990s saw an expansion of finance as a discipline, Toan completed a PhD at UNSW and the School began its recruitment in North America which has continued until today. The staff profile has also changed significantly in number (from a handful in the 1970s) and diversity (staff from all over the world – 22 nations are represented in the current staff profile). Together with Economics and Accounting, Banking and Finance is today one of the three big schools in Commerce and Economics, a far cry from its modest beginning. Without a doubt, contributing to this growth were the following heads of school: Rex Olsson, Ian Sharpe, Fari Moshirian, and the incumbent Terry Walter. In their individual/personal way they have shaped the School as it is now.
At a School farewell function held in the CBD, Toan commented that throughout his career at UNSW he had been helped by many people, in particular, he acknowledged Rex Olsson, Carl Chiarella, Ah Boon Sim, Ben Hunt, Ian Sharpe, Andrew Jeffrey, Fari Moshirian, Suk Joong Kim, Terry Walter, Leslie Ritchie, Clarissa Zappia, Shirley Webster, Stephanie Osborne and Bec Archer. Lastly, Toan thanked his family for their support.
Terry Walter, on behalf of the staff of Banking and Finance, acknowledged Toan’s contribution to the School, twice as Acting Head of School, as an Associate Head of School and for his knowledge of procedures, his unheralded support and advice to many colleagues and students, his constancy and two-shift days, 7 days a week. Ah Boon Sim also gave an insight into the magnificent contribution that Toan had made to the School over the years. The good thing is that Toan has not left us because he has accepted a Visiting Associate Professorship for an initial period of three years. The history of Banking and Finance is still with us and Toan will continue to keep us entertained with his recollections of how it used to be. We all wish him a very happy and successful semi-retirement.
A/Prof Toan Pham's retirement function photograph album.
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