Dr Marina Magidou, UCLan Cyprus Lecturer in Accounting and Finance, received one of the Top Paper Awards from the 28th Annual Global Finance Conference 2021 for the paper “Stock price crash risk: A critique of the agency theory viewpoint” co-authored with Dr Panayiotis C. Andreou and Dr Neophytos Lambertides.

This paper focuses on the stream of crash risk literature that examines the stock price crashes from the agency theory viewpoint and recognizes the central role of managers in exploiting asymmetric information to hide negative news from the investment community. The findings bring to the fore a stark contrast between the steadily increasing trend of the empirical occurrence of crashes and the definition of crash as an extreme event, by presenting a puzzle which cannot be reconciled with the prominent agency-based channels proposed by the existing literature.

The mission of the Global Finance Conference is to promote research by providing forums for finance professionals to debate, exchange ideas, disseminate and to advance the education, learning, and practice of global financial economics by attracting a significant number of researchers, academics, and policy makers from around the world. In the context of the Global Finance Conference, the top papers selected from a set of outstanding papers, receive a “Top Paper Award”.

The Top Papers Awards include several benefits for the winners to recognise their outstanding research work. Marina is delighted to receive this prestigious award and she wants to express her sincere appreciation for the recognition by her peers for this research. She believes that this great honour constitutes the crowning of the long-term, highly intensive work of the mentors who instructed her, and the excellent colleagues whom she has the privilege of learning from. Finally, this award has a special significance and meaning not only for the first steps of an early career researcher but also for the UCLan Cyprus to get international promotion.”