Michael Brennan gave the Dinner Keynote Address, entitled "Tranching and Rating". Mike is a broad and deep academic figure in finance. He is generous with his time in talking with others abour finance, so he will enrich our conference. He is a past president of the American Finance Association, a past editor of The Journal of Finance and the founding editor of Review of Financial Studies.
Philip Dybvig gave the Luncheon Keynote Address, entitled "The Collected Works of Stephen Ross". Phil has been a faculty member at Princeton, Yale and Washington University. He was Program Chair of the Western Finance Association meetings in 2002. His theory papers have covered a wide and deep range, including models of arbitrage pricing, portfolio theory and contracting. His 1983 paper on bank runs with Doug Diamond established two stable equilibria in banking: one with runs and one without. They showed that deposit insurance can make the equilibrium without bank runs the most likely.
The conference was held in Kananaskis Village, between Calgary and Banff National Park.
Several donors have generously agreed to give awards for the best paper in various categories. In order to be considered for one of the Best Paper Awards, the paper must be accepted for the program and one of its authors must be registered for the Conference by May 30, 2008.
The conference was hosted by the Haskayne School of Business of the University of Calgary.
The NFA 2008 Conference Chair was Gordon Sick
The Program Committee Chair was Alex David
