NFA 2013 in Québec City

The NFA 2013 Conference will be held in Québec City at the Loews Hotel Le Concorde from September 27-29, 2013. The local host is Faculté des sciences de l’administration, Université Laval. The conference organizers will be Stéphane Chrétien, Van Son Lai and Issouf Soumaré.

Here is a direct link to the page where you can upload a revised paper and review papers that have been assigned to you.

NFA 2014 in Ottawa

The NFA 2014 Conference will be held on Ottawa, September 12-14, 2014.

The Newly Incorporated NFA

As announced at its most recent annual meeting in Niagara Falls, the Northern Finance Association was federally incorporated as a not-for-profit society in September 2012. The intent was to establish a permanent association whose board members would be democratically elected by its members. Voting for the board members will occur at the 2013 annual meetings in Laval. However, in order to first incorporate the association and develop a set of corporate bylaws, federal law required that we establish an inaugural board. As such, the Articles of Incorporation of the Association specify a board size of 4-8 members and list the following individuals as inaugural board members:
• Brian Smith (Wilfrid Laurier University), President
• Issouf Soumaré (Université Laval), Vice President and Program Chair
• Gordon Sick (University of Calgary), Secretary/Treasurer (until September)
• Ron Giammarino (University of British Columbia)
• Mark Kamstra (York University)
• Lisa Kramer (University of Toronto)
• Vikas Mehrotra (University of Alberta)

Lisa did a lot of the Secretary/Treasurer work in the early stages, managing the filings of the Articles of Incorporation and managing our drafts of Bylaws.

The membership will have an opportunity to vote on formal adoption of the bylaws at the 2013 annual meeting. We used the Corporations Canada Bylaw Builder to ensure compliance with Canadian laws, and used the bylaws of the American Finance Association, Western Finance Association and Canadian Economics Association as valuable references. We have opted for open democracy and good governance as much as possible, while allowing for enough continuity to pass on the knowledge of how to run the NFA successfully. Our draft Bylaws provide for an Executive Committee of 4 individuals: Vice President/Program Chair, President and Past President, plus a Secretary/Treasurer, who will serve for a 3-year renewable term. The Vice President/Program Chair will be selected from the pool of existing board members, in order to provide a valuable year of learning about how the organization works. There will be 4 board members at Large, each serving for renewable 2-year terms. There is a recall provision for the Association members to democratically remove a board member.

At the 2013 meetings, all registered conference attendees will have an opportunity to vote for board members. Furthermore, prior to the meetings, interested parties may nominate themselves or others as candidates for board of the directors.

We have approached our own universities for Gold Sponsorships in return for a $5000 donation and so far 7 of them have offered to join this program. We extend this invitation to other universities and if you would like to get your university to donate, please contact the President or Secretary/Treasurer for details. Gold Sponsors will be noted on a sponsorship page on the website, along with their school logo, and will also appear on literature distributed at our annual meetings. We also have Silver and Bronze sponsorships for schools that want to donate at a lower level. The NFA Gold, Silver and Bronze Sponsorship recognition will persist for 20 years.

We will commence a membership drive in 2013. We will not have a submission fee for NFA 2013. Membership will be required for attendance at the annual meeting, consistent with policies of comparable finance and economics associations.

We have extended free lifetime memberships to the 3 original founders of the Northern Finance Association:
• Giovanni Barone-Adesi
• Vijay Jog
• Lawrence Kryzanowski.
They will be noted with title “NFA Founder” on the NFA website. Their early leadership and direction has led the way for local organizers to host a series of increasingly successful NFA conferences and we thank them for their foresight and hard work.

Our NFA 2013 conference will be a joint venture with Université Laval, in which they handle all the financial flows associated with the conference. The NFA will manage the website and work with Issouf Soumaré in managing the conference program.

Subsequent annual conferences will be run by the Northern Finance Association. The Vice President will be the Program Chair and the NFA will handle all the financial flows associated with the conferences.
We will offer local universities the opportunity to be a local sponsor of the annual conference. Their participation will be acknowledged.

However, local sponsors will not be essential for running an annual conference. This allows the NFA to run conferences in venues that do not have a university that is in a position to run a full conference.

We know that several universities are keen to have the annual conference near their school, and we will be getting in touch with the universities we know about, in 2013, concerning how to become a local sponsor in a future year. If you would like to get your own university involved, please contact the President, Vice-President or Secretary/Treasurer to discuss the possibility. There are advantages in being a local sponsor: international recognition, and low travel costs for your own colleagues to attend the annual conference. With the newly incorporated NFA, local sponsors will not need to manage the program or provide the financial guarantees (and cover potential losses) associated with running the conference. A local sponsorship is for the year of the conference and can take the form of donations in kind (volunteers for registration, AV equipment loan), or a donation to enhance a meal or entertainment event.

This message is provided with the approval of the NFA Board.

--Gordon Sick, Secretary-Treasurer gordonsick@northernfinance.org
December 18, 2012, revised January 15, 2013