Organizing a Successful Academic Finance Conference: Thoughts, Heuristics and Statistical Evidence

We analyze demographics and employ institutional information to determine whether differential attendee characteristics affect the importance of conference attributes among constituencies of our academy. We test some commonly held priors, like location, cost and conviviality factors, and show that these are not critical as priorities for planning successful conferences. For a successful conference, organizers should focus on: a) research feedback, b) intellectual stimulation, c) research idea generation, d) networking potential and e) quality of past presentations. These characteristics were robust across all demographics and did not materially vary by gender, participation age and university type classification, except for the quality of past presentation.