Call: Vernon L. Smith Young Talent Award 2025

[Peiran Jiao]

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

We think that this call is interesting for the younger ESA members.

The Society for Experimental Finance is proud to announce the call for submissions to the 2025 Vernon L. Smith Young Talent Award, awarding two times $4,000 for the best research proposals in finance using experimental methodology. We thank Chapman University for partly sponsoring the prize again this year. To apply for the VSYA, please submit a proposal for an experimental research project via the application form (link) and send the completed application form to off...@expfin.org with the subject “VSYA25” and your name.  

Requirements

• The funds need to be earmarked for running the experimental project that was submitted. Any resulting publication must acknowledge funding from the SEF through the VSYA.
• The following holds for all authors. Your project is eligible for assessment if 1) you have received your PhD after 2019 or have no PhD yet, 2) you have an affiliation with a University or other research institution, and 3) you are an SEF member. (Membership in the SEF is free – simply register on our website expfin.org and tick the required box to join)
• Your project’s research question needs to be set in a finance context, such as financial economics, corporate finance, household finance, or sustainable finance.
• Your proposal should describe a proper experiment with a minimum of two treatments organized as a randomized control trial (no quasi-experiment, comparing two distinct groups of participants exposed to the same stimuli, and no demonstration, comparing outcomes from one environment/task to theoretical benchmarks).

After screening the submissions for eligibility, we forward the anonymized application forms to the panel members. The panel members are Camelia Kuhnen (University of South Carolina), Zwetelina Iliewa (University of Bonn), Tibor Neugebauer (University of Luxembourg), and Olga Rud (University of Starvanger). They evaluate the proposals and select the winners.

Deadline for submission: November 15, 2025

Check out the awards page for past year's award winners.

Best regards

Olga A. Rud, Anita Kopányi-Peuker, and Peiran Jiao