European Financial Management Association (EFMA) Annual Meetings: a Retrospective Evaluation

• Author: Andreas Walter,John A. Doukas
• Date: 01 September 2015
• Published date: 01 September 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-036X.2013.12037.x

European Financial Management

Association (EFMA) Annual Meetings:

a Retrospective Evaluation

John A. Doukas

Graduate School of Business, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529‐0222, USA and Judge

Business School, University of Cambridge, UK

E-mail: jdoukas@odu.edu

Andreas Walter

Department of Financial Services, University of Giessen, Germany

E-mail: andreas.walter@wirtschaft.uni-giessen.de

Abstract

We provide a retrospective evaluation of the European Financial Management

Association (EFMA) annual meetings from 2001 to 2010. In the 10‐year

investigation period, 2,986 papers have been presented at the annual EFMA

meetings. Presented research has, in accordance with the objective of the EFMA,

a strong focus on European financial topics, and most accepted papers were

written by European authors. Our analysis reveals that empirical papers

analysing European datasets have a positive impact on the likelihood of being

published in the European Financial Management (EFM), the journal of the

EFMA, compared to other peer‐reviewed journals. This evidence appears to be

consistent with the EFM objectives to foster more research on European finance

issues.

Keywords: finance conference, publication analysis, retrospective evaluation

JEL classification: G0

1. Introduction

The European Financial Management Association (EFMA) was founded in 1994 by John

A. Doukas ‘to encourage research and disseminate knowledge about financial decision

making in all areas of finance as it relates to European corporations, financial institutions

and capital markets’.

1

To achieve this objective, the EFMA holds an annual meeting and

Helpful comments from two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged.

1

See the association’s website under http://www.efmaefm.org.

European Financial Management, Vol. 21, No. 4, 2015, 790–810

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-036X.2013.12037.x

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

provides its membership with a refereed journal, the European Financial Management

(EFM), founded in 1995 by John A. Doukas, which sponsors EFM symposiums on

different topics (since 2005).

The objective of this paper is to provide a retrospective evaluation of the EFMA

annual meetings from 2001 to 2010 in an attempt to determine whether its annual

meetings help to promote the EFMA’saim of encouraging research on European

finance issues. To the best of our knowledge, an analysis of finance conferences with

respect to the aim and scope of the hosting associations has not been conducted before.

However, there are a number of studies on retrospective evaluations of finance journals

(e.g., Schwert (1993) for the Journal of Financial Economics, Altman et al. (1997) for

the Journal of Banking and Finance, Thakor (1998) for the Journal of Financial

Intermediation, Borokhovich et al. (1999) for Financial Management, Chan (2001) for

the International Review of Economics and Finance, and Otchere (2003) for

Accounting and Finance). These studies evaluate research trends for publications in the

relevant journals with respect to JEL codes, authors and institutions. In addition, many

of the publications cited above contain a list of the most actively cited papers in the

respective journal.

Most closely related to our work is a publication by Chan et al. (2009), which analyses

publications in the EFM during the period 1995–2008. The authors find the journal to be,

consistent with the mission of the EFMA, a prominent publication outlet for authors

affiliated with European institutions and for European research content. In addition, they

note that the EFM has achieved a highly respectable status among all finance journals.

Our paper contributes to the literature in sever al ways. First, we document the

affiliation characteristics of co ntributors to the EFMA annual meetings and find that

about two out of every three papers ar e affiliated with authors from Euro pean

universities. Thus, as far as author s are concerned, the objective of the EFMA is fulfilled.

In addition, we find that authors from No rth America (18.3% of contributions), Australia

(7.5% of contributions) and Asia (7.0% of cont ributions) are also important contributors

to the EFMA annual meetings. In conseque nce, the EFMA annual meeting has

established itself as a truly global fina nce conference. We also find that many of the

empirical papers explore data from Europe, anoth er finding that is consistent with the

association’s mission. Second, we an alyse whether papers presented at the EFMA

conferences are subsequently pub lished in journals. Our findings reveal that E FMA

conference papers written by Europe an authors and on European datasets ar e equally

likely to be published in any peer‐reviewed jour nal. However, publications analys ing

European datasets appear in less reputab le journals compared to the remaining empirical

papers. Accordingly, the mission of the EFMA to promote research on Eur opean finance

issues is still a valid task; internati onal finance journals still seem to promo te studies on

non‐European research content, most pr ominently on the US capital market. Finally, we

explore whether the EFM journal encourag es research on European finance issues with

its editorial decisions. We find that em pirical papers using European datasets and studies

written by European researchers have a positive impact on being pu blished in the EFM

journal compared to publications in other peer‐reviewed journals. Thus, not only the

EFMA annual meetings but also the EFM jour nal plays an important role to encourage

research on European finance issues.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the compilation

of the database. Empirical findings are presented in Section 3. Section 4 concludes the

paper.

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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