Christoph Meinerding about the Conference of the German Finance Association

This paper proposes and tests a new source of time variation in real investment opportunities, namely long-run shocks to the productivity of the investment sector, to explain the joint behavior of macroeconomic quantities and asset prices.

The number of researchers doing asset pricing on a decent level in Germany is still tiny. This surprises me every year at the DGF meeting because international conferences and journals are full of it.

I was also surprised by the fact that, after so many years, the DGF meeting is still a totally German conference. We should all think about why international top researchers don’t attend the main finance meeting in Germany except for delivering the keynote speech.

A paper by Jantje Sönksen from Tübingen. She estimates an equilibrium model with rare disasters, and that is exactly the topic I have been working on over the past years. By the way, she also received the best paper award at the DGF PhD seminar.

The usual gossip: who moves to which university, which university is going to open up a position next, etc.

Not much. The few papers I liked were not new to me because I had already read them during the review process. Other than that, there were no truly inspiring papers on the program.