Martin Boyer wins an award from the Quarterly Journal of Finance

January 8, 2015

Full Professor Martin Boyer (Finance) has won the 2013 Best Paper Award from the Quarterly Journal of Finance and the Midwest Finance Association, for his article entitled “Alleviating Coordination Problems and Regulatory Constraints Through Financial Risk Management,” co-written with Marcel Boyer (Université de Montréal) and René Garcia (EDHEC Business School, France). The three will share a prize of $5,000, to be presented at the Association’s Annual Conference, to be held in Chicago from March 4 to 7.

The winning paper proposes a characterization of the firm where variations in the market price of risk should induce adjustments in the firm's portfolio of projects. In a setting where managers disagree with respect to what investment maximizes value, changing the portfolio of projects generates coordination costs. The authors then propose a new role for financial risk management based on the idea that the use of financial derivatives reduces coordination costs by moving the organization's expected cash flows and risks toward a point where coordination in favor of real changes is easier to achieve.

Professor Boyer holds a PhD in Insurance and Risk Management from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and an MSc in Economics from the Université de Montréal. He holds the Professorship in Economic Behaviour in Finance and Insurance and is a CIRANO Fellow. He was Director of the HEC Montréal Department of Finance from 2007 to 2010 and Director of the Assurances et gestion des risques journal from 2003 to 2011. He is now the Associate Director of the Journal of Risk and Insurance and a member of the editorial committee of the Gestion journal.

In addition to publishing some sixty papers, Professor Boyer received the 2008 Leadership award from the Quebec Division of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada, the 2010 Bank of Canada Award for the Best Paper on the Canadian Financial System, for his paper co-written with former HEC Montréal student Léa Stern, and the 2012 Best Paper on the Theory of Risk Award from the Casualty Actuarial Society, for his paper co-written with colleagues Éric Jacquier and Simon van Norden entitled “Are underwriting cycles real and forecastable?”