The 2019 Dies academicus ceremony takes place this Friday, May 24 at the University of Lausanne. On this occasion, and on the proposal of HEC Lausanne, Professor Antoinette Schoar of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will be awarded a doctorate honoris causa.
Portrait of the awardee
Professor Antoinette Schoar is well known for the breadth and depth of her many scientific contributions in the fields of entrepreneurship and finance. These have had a significant impact on the research community, practitioners, students and society as a whole.
Antoinette Schoar is a Michael M. Koerner Professor (1949) of Finance and Entrepreneurship at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. She also is a co-chair of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Corporate Finance group. She received a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 2000. Her papers have been published in several top journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Her research covers several areas including entrepreneurial finance, household finance and finance in emerging markets. Her scientific study entitled "Managing with style: The effect of managers on firm policies", which examines the effect of individual managers on corporate behavior and performance, has had an invaluable impact. Written in collaboration with Professor Marianne Bertrand, it was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2003. Prof. Schoar's contribution has made such a breakthrough that it has been cited more than 2000 times in a short period of time and has fueled a constructive debate in the practitioner community, thereby becoming an essential reference in several graduate courses in finance.
Similarly, Prof. Schoar's seminal article, "Private Equity performance: Returns, persistence, and capital flows" (Journal of Finance, 2003), written in collaboration with economist Steven Kaplan, marks a fundamental step in understanding private equity partnerships. Using unpublished data on the performance of individual funds collected by Venture Economics, the two authors examine the performance and capital inflows of private equity partnerships. Among their many results, they show that returns persist strongly across all funds raised by individual private equity firms and that the most successful partnerships are more likely to obtain follow-on funds and larger funds.
Professor Schoar has also received several awards, including the Brattle Prize for best article in the Journal of Finance and the Kauffman Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship in 2009. Her contributions are not limited to the scientific and business communities as she demonstrates extraordinary teaching and practical skills. In particular, she shared her scientific breakthroughs with her students and concretely offered her expertise to solve several societal problems. In 2005, she won an Outstanding Teaching Award and her students noted her tremendous ability to explain complex concepts in entrepreneurial finance.
The ceremony will be followed in the afternoon by a seminar given by Prof. Schoar
The Dies academicus ceremony can be watched live on the UNIL website and Facebook page on Friday, May 24, 2019 from 10am to 12pm.
On the same day, from 3pm to 5pm, Professor Antoinette Schoar will present her research entitled "Investing outside the box: Evidence from alternative vehicles in private capital". The seminar is aimed at an academic audience and is open to anyone interested in her research (more information about the seminar).