Finance professor pens another "Best Paper"

Radford University Associate Professor of Finance Rodrigo Hernandez recently received the 2014 Academy of Economics and Finance Best Paper in Finance award.

Hernandez and his co-authors, Yingying Shao and Pu Liu, won the annual award for their paper, "Valuation of Flex Bonus Certificates - Theory and Evidence."

Each year, the Academy of Economics and Finance holds a conference for economics and finance practitioners to gather and present academic research. All presenters at the conference are invited to submit the paper they presented at the conference to the outstanding paper competition.

There are two competitions - one for finance and one for economics. Papers are evaluated by a committee of judges who select the winner. 

"Choosing the best finance paper from the 2014 AEF conference was very difficult. There were many excellent papers," said Jim Yoder, who chaired the finance judges committee. "However, the selection committee, after much deliberation, unanimously choose Valuation of Flex Bonus Certificates – Theory and Evidence."

Yoder continued, saying Hernandez and his co-authors "did an exhaustive theoretical analysis of a new, complex, financial product: Flex Bonus Certificates. They then tested their model and showed it closely fit actual prices in the financial market."

Yoder, a business professor at the University of West Georgia, said he and his fellow judges "felt the paper was extremely thorough, well organized and clearly written."

Hernandez's research focuses on financial products called structured products.

"Typically, structured products are marketed and sold to investors by banks," said Hernandez, who has published 16 papers on the topic. "Regulators have concerns about the sophistication of structured products, especially when issuers begin targeting less-sophisticated individual investors as primary customers." 

Hernandez is no stranger to winning awards for his research papers. His paper "Exotic Structured Products – The Case of Victory Certificates" won the best paper award at the Academy of Business Research, Spring 2014 Conference in New Orleans and he won best paper in Accounting, Finance and Economics at the 2011 Academic and Business Research Institute Conference in Nashville for "Contingent claim valuation - The case of Phӧnix Certificates."