The conference will take place on  June 10-11, 2024 at the Columbia Business School in New York City. It will begin on Monday night, June 10, with the reception and dinner, and the paper presentations will take place the next day on June 11.  

Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have rapidly developed alongside a sharp rise in commercial investments in these technologies. Perhaps the most visible recent manifestation of this has been the rapid development and deployment of large language models (LLMs).

AI investments have already begun to transform financial services, and there are enormous economic and financial opportunities in this transformation. There is also an increasing discussion of the potential risks that these technologies could pose to financial and economic stability, including much recent discussion on existential risk and the risk of widening existing societal disparities. To gain a deeper understanding of these issues, the Department of Finance at the Columbia Business School and the Review of Financial Studies (RFS) will jointly host a conference on the opportunities and risks of AI in Finance.

We invite the submission of empirical, theoretical, or experimental papers that study the opportunities and risks of AI technologies in Finance. Our goal is to deepen understanding of how AI is being used or might be used by firms (across all sectors), different types of investors, households, and other market participants, as well as to study the broader societal and regulatory implications of the rapid deployment of these technologies. To be considered, submitted papers must be explicitly about the use or potential use of AI technologies by market participants, broadly construed. We encourage the submission of research papers on the following and related topics:

-          Uses of AI by firms in corporate finance and their implications for corporate policies:  capital allocation, innovation, product and/or service development, risk management, financial management, forecasting,  production processes, marketing and sales, supply-chain management.

-         AI use in trading and asset management: Use by different market participants (e.g., by hedge funds, mutual funds, PE/VC), and different asset classes, and their implications for market equilibrium.

-          AI use by banks and other credit providers: credit, wealth management, fraud detection, customer targeting, trading, risk management and hedging.

-          AI use in other financial forecasting: by management, analysts, market participants, financial market regulators, or other market participants.

-          AI use for understanding consumer financial behavior and decision-making: marketing in retail financial services, modelling complex consumer decisions, and the (good and bad) implications of the use of such technologies in these settings.

-          AI and labor replacement vs. augmentation: studies of settings and occupations where AI tools have been significantly deployed for labor augmentation/replacement specifically for applications in finance as well as the impacts of such shifts on firms’ operations and performance.

-          Financial market and macroeconomic implications of AI use by industry participants: implications for prices, volumes, market volatility, crashes, market design, growth, risks, competitive dynamics, entry and exit of market participants.

-          AI, financial stability, and disparities:  studies of the potential risks to financial stability posed by AI use by market participants, model instability and model risks, biases, discrimination, and disparities.

-        Frictions and market failures in AI adoption/use and regulatory solutions.

The paper submission deadline is April 7, 2024. PhD students are welcome to submit. Early-stage work is encouraged.  Please submit your papers on `Paper Submission' page. Paper submission fee is $100 US dollars. Paper selection will be finalized by early May of 2024.

RFS sponsorship: Co-sponsorship with the Review of Financial Studies offers authors a dual submission option. The authors are encouraged to choose to submit to both the conference and the Review of Financial Studies but can also choose to submit to the conference program only. When submitting a paper, the authors must indicate on the conference submission form whether they are interested to have their paper considered under this dual review option with the RFS. As is the case in all RFS dual conference submissions, the dual submission allows a paper an independent submission at the RFS: if the paper invited to be summited to the RFS by the RFS Editors via this venue is rejected, the paper can be submitted again to the RFS later. Our goal is to have a special issue of the Review of Financial Studies with the papers that are successful in the revision process in 2025. For more details about the dual submission policy of the RFS please see

http://sfs.org/dualsubmissionpolicy/

Program Chairs

Tania Babina

(Columbia University)

Ansgar Walther

(Imperial College Business School)

Sponsoring Editors of the RFS

Itay Goldstein

(University of Pennsylvania)

Tarun Ramadorai

(Imperial College Business School)