The Centre for Analytical Finance (CAF) at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, India, will hold its annual flagship Summer Research Conference in Finance during July 26 - 29, 2012. The conference will begin with a reception for the participants on Thursday, July 26, evening, followed by paper presentations on July 27 - 29. Douglas Diamond, Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and Richard N. Rosett Faculty Fellow, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, and CAF Academic Fellow 2012, will deliver a keynote speech at the conference.

The theme of the conference is Recent Advances in Corporate Finance. Besides ISB faculty, the conference program committee is expected to include Viral Acharya, Rajesh Aggarwal, Franklin Allen, Thorsten Beck, Arnoud Boot, Glenn Boyle, Bhagwan Chowdhry, Stijn Claessens, Francesca Cornelli, Sudipto Dasgupta, Asli Demirguc-Kunt, Joseph Fan, Mariassunta Giannetti, Charles Hadlock, Thomas Hellmann, Ravi Jagannathan, Kose John, Han Kim, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Kai Li, Vojislav Maksimovic, Ron Masulis, Randall Morck, Tom Noe, Terry Odean, NR Prabhala, Manju Puri, Subrata Sarkar, Raghu Sundaram, Anjan Thakor, and Vish Viswanathan.

This will be our ninth summer research conference. Over time, the conference has become very competitive, with paper submissions from twenty odd countries and the acceptance rate nearing one in ten. The post-publication success rate of the conference papers is one of the highest of all competitive finance conferences. In recent years, the publication rate in top journals (Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Theory, and Quarterly Journal of Economics) has been one out of three papers presented.

Topics
Papers in all areas of corporate finance are welcome, including corporate financing and corporate growth, corporate investment decisions, real options, corporate finance and product markets, control rights and corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, institutional and legal framework, behavioral implications, and corporate financing in emerging markets. We are planning a special session on corporate financing in emerging markets, so papers in this area are especially welcome. Theoretical as well as empirical papers will be considered. Papers with a focus on new ideas and concepts, or cutting-edge tools and techniques of analysis, will be preferred. The conference program committee will anonymously evaluate and rank the submitted papers. For each session, the selected papers will be matched by topic.