MACAU, July 23 - To promote innovation in finance research, the Faculty of Business Administration (FBA) of the University of Macau (UM) and the Asian Finance Association (AsianFA) jointly organised the 36th Asian Finance Association Annual Conference. The three-day conference brought together about 300 finance scholars from around the world to share their research findings.

The Asian Finance Association Annual Conference is one of the largest and most influential academic finance conferences in the Asia-Pacific region. At the opening ceremony, Michael Hui, vice rector of UM, encouraged finance scholars to actively engage in academic and research exchanges. At the closing ceremony, Yu Jun, dean of FBA, noted that the conference was a significant contribution to the development and advancement of finance research in the Asia-Pacific region.

The conference featured two keynote speeches, which were delivered by Sheridan Titman, McAllister Centennial Chair in Financial Services at the University of Texas at Austin and research associate of the US National Bureau of Economic Research; and Lin Chen, associate vice-president of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), and associate dean and chair of finance of HKU Business School, respectively. The two speeches were moderated by Lai Neng, dean of UM’s Honours College, and Kang Wenjin, head of the Department of Finance and Business Economics of FBA, respectively.

Notably, the conference included a special panel session on fintech chaired by Kang Wenjin, where academic and industry experts discussed in depth the application of big data and artificial intelligence technologies in finance research. The conference had received nearly 800 papers from renowned finance scholars around the world, of which about 200 papers were accepted to form more than 50 discussion sessions and a PhD consortium. They covered cutting-edge finance topics such as algorithmic trading, cryptocurrencies, ESG and green finance, fintech, machine learning, and more. In addition, six Best Paper Awards were presented, and one of the awarded papers was co-authored by Xie Jing, associate professor of finance at UM, and scholars from the National University of Singapore and Huazhong University of Science and Technology.