We develop a novel framework to evaluate the quality of academic finance conferences. In particular, we analyze the publication and citation outcomes of 18,535 conference papers presented at 15 academic finance conferences between 2007 and 2012. In addition, we provide evidence of the perceived quality of these academic finance conferences by surveying a large number of participants of the 15 conferences. The use of three different quality proxies enables us to contrast levels of conference quality based on the quality of presented papers to levels of conference quality perceived by conference participants. Our results reveal two quality clusters of academic finance conferences and show that the use of the three quality dimensions, while generally robust, is associated with a number of peculiarities.

Extant literature consistently documents that investors tilt their domestic equity portfolios towards regionally close stocks (local bias). We hypothesize that individual investors’ local bias is not limited to the domestic sphere but instead also determines their international investment decisions. Our results confirm the presence of a cross-border local bias. Specifically, we show (i) that the stockholdings of individual investors living within regional proximity to a foreign country display a significantly lower foreign investment bias towards investment opportunities in that country and (ii) that this drop in foreign investment bias levels is disproportionately driven by investments in regionally close neighbor-country companies. The impact of cross-border local bias on investors’ bilateral foreign equity investments is economically significant and holds even after controlling for previously identified explanations of international asset allocation.