Dimensional Prizes Recognise Innovative Research

The winners of the Dimensional Fund Advisors Prizes for 2019 were announced during the annual meeting of the American Finance Association (AFA). The awards were presented January 4, 2020, in San Diego.

The Dimensional Fund Advisors Prizes reward eligible papers published in The Journal of Finance from the prior year in any research area other than corporate finance. (The Brattle Group Prizes, which were also awarded at the AFA annual meeting, recognise outstanding papers in the field of corporate finance.) Winning papers are selected by the editors of The Journal of Finance from a list of papers nominated by the associate editors.

First Prize was awarded to Samuel M. Hartzmark and David H. Solomon for “The Dividend Disconnect.” The Distinguished Paper honorees were Jules H. van Binsbergen and Christian C. Opp for “Real Anomalies” and Ian W. R. Martin and Christian Wagner for “What Is the Expected Return on a Stock?”

“For nearly 40 years, Dimensional has been taking the great ideas in financial science and applying them to real-world portfolios,” Dimensional Co-CEO and Chief Investment Officer Gerard O’Reilly said. “We are proud to support pioneering research and congratulate this year’s recipients on their achievements.”

The Dimensional Fund Advisors Prizes are part of the firm’s broader commitment to supporting scholarship and academic excellence within the research community.

Dimensional has deep historical ties to both the AFA and The Journal of Finance. Many of the academics affiliated with Dimensional and its funds are past presidents of the AFA, including Merton Miller (1976), Robert Merton (1986), Myron Scholes (1990), George Constantinides (2001), Douglas Diamond (2003), Kenneth French (2007), and Darrell Duffie (2009). Ingrid Werner, who serves with Scholes, Constantinides, Diamond, and Duffie as Independent Directors of Dimensional’s US Mutual Funds Board, is currently on the AFA Board of Directors. Beginning in 2008, the AFA and Dimensional coproduced the Masters of Finance project, a series of video interviews featuring important contributors to financial economic knowledge, including Eugene Fama, Scholes, Merton, and others. 

In addition to Dimensional’s relationship with the AFA and The Journal of Finance, the firm sponsors the Fama-DFA Prizes, awarded annually since 1997 to the top two papers in the areas of capital markets and asset pricing published in The Journal of Financial Economics, another leading academic journal in finance. Dimensional also proudly sponsors the AIM Investment Conference, a biannual academic conference organised by the AIM Investment Center at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the AIM Investment Center Best Paper Award, which is chosen from the papers presented at that event by conference participants.

“Rigorous, empirical research is the bedrock for everything we do to help clients,” O’Reilly said. “We thank this year’s recipients for their contributions to advancing our understanding of markets and hope that their work inspires future researchers.”