October 2004

Prize Winners Announced at Chicago Conference

Zoran Ivkovich and Scott Weisbenner won the second-place prize in the Eleventh Chicago Quantitative Alliance Conference Annual Academic Competition for their paper "Portfolio Concentration and the Performance of Individual Investors." The paper was written with Clemens Sialm from the University of Michigan.

Ivkovich is an assistant professor of finance whose research interests include mutual funds, information content of analysts’ earnings forecasts and investment recommendations, and the investment behavior of individuals. Weisbenner, also an assistant professor finance, researches household portfolio decisions and how they are influenced by taxation and psychological factors as well as issues concerning retirement saving and pension plans and corporate payout policy

The Chicago Quantitative Alliance is an organization that gathers practitioners and academics with a broad spectrum of research interests in financial economics. In addition to the academic competition, the two-day conference featured several prominent speakers, including Larry Harris, until recently the chief economist of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and Robert Engle, recepient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics.