HoD News - 15 January 2018
Dear Colleagues,
Happy New Year.
This year has started very hectic with interviews of almost 75 job market candidates in Philadelphia at the AEA-ASSA job market meeting over three days. Interviews were parallel in three hotel interview suites with 2-3 interviewers in each suite. We were caught in a snowstorm with temperatures below minus 25 degrees (with chill factor), but eventually we made it even though Kim Christensen and Allan Sørensen were delayed from San Diego, where they are presently spending their sabbatical. I would like to thank the interviewing team for their efforts and commitment. Thanks for your great work. It was fun.
We are now flying in a prioritized list of job market candidates. This is going to be very intense in the next few weeks. I expect and appreciate your contribution in this process by attending job market seminars, meeting with potential future colleagues, and so on. In addition to those invited from abroad, we are going to have internal applicants giving job market presentations.
We have a large number of jobs to fill, and many of these are partly funded by external grants. As I mentioned in my newsletter before Christmas, department members have been exceptionally successful in attracting external grants during 2017, and this will have a major influence on recruitments. The fields in which we mainly hire are in Accounting, Finance, Macroeconomics, International Economics and Trade, and Climate Econometrics and Business Statistics.
By the end of last year, the Danish Finance Institute (DFI) was established funded by the Danish Bankers and Mortgage Association (“Finans Danmark”) by a DKK 7.8 million per year endowment grant covering 10 years starting in 2018. The idea is to strengthen the research environments in finance in Denmark by offering recruitment and publication salary bonuses to attract the best finance researchers internationally and to focus on research quality in finance. Attention is on publications in the absolute top ranked finance journals. Aarhus University, Copenhagen Business School, University of Copenhagen and University of Southern Denmark are the universities participating in this initiative. The payment of bonuses will be significant and is expected to have a major impact on educations and future research quality at the participating universities. However, it is also going to affect the wage dispersion for faculty within our department across fields. The university is not involved in the payment of DFI bonuses; bonuses are treated externally to the university and the department. But still, the individual incentives and the pay-off to the department in terms of research and education advances are expected to be significant.
As head of department I am supporting the DFI initiative. However, I am also fully aware of the challenges involved in the establishment of the Danish Finance Institute. From my position, all DFI members from our department are expected to contribute equally to the administrative and education tasks to be lifted within the department. I will enforce this very strictly for the legitimacy of this institutional construction anchored within our department.
Niels