What a Hectic Couple of Weeks!

On top of finishing the two courses I was teaching this term, the past two weeks have been the busiest ones I've had research-wise this year, with deadlines to submit papers to two of the three major conferences.

The first one was for the European Finance Association meeting in Copenhagen in August 2012. The second meeting, whose deadline is today, is the American Finance Association meeting in San Diego in January 2013.

In the end I managed to submit three papers.

Here they are: 

The Role of Institutional Investors in Voting: Evidence from the Securities Lending Market

  (with Reena Aggarwal and Jason Sturgess, both from Georgetown University)

The Big Short versus The Right Short: Short Selling Activity and Housing Prices Predictability (with Carles Vergara-Alert from IESE)

Ownership Structure, Limits to Arbitrage and Stock Returns: Evidence from Equity Lending Markets

Thanks to all of my co-authors for the hard work. Let's get those babies in!

Now is back to revising them all and submit them to journals.

Make Voting More Transparent

Last December I recorded a podcast talking a bit about one of my papers and its implications to the real world.

Here is the link if you are interested.

Great editing job by Judge's team!

Publish or Perish

This is a great article by Matthew Spiegel (editor of the RFS) on the current status of publication requirements and the fact that referees ask for too many robustness tests and changes rather than evaluating whether or not the article has passed the bar to be published.

I maybe biased due to not having that many years down the road but here is my take. Of course referees usually make great suggestions and help to improve a lot a paper, but Matthew is right that often the need to play the game of pleasing referees makes papers unnecessarily long and the review process more annoying to everyone. 

The fact that introductions are now four times longer than in the 80s is great example of this gaming taking place. In the end, as economists say, it all boils down to setting proper incentives.