Call: 2025 Vernon L. Smith Young Talent Award

We want to announce the call for nominations for the annual Vernon L. Smith Young Talent Award (VSYA) in Experimental Finance.

The Society for Experimental Finance and Chapman University will award two prize of US$4000 for the best research proposals in finance using experimental methodology. We will invite the winners or a representative of the winners to present their work at the EF2026 in Toulouse, France.

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 office@expfin.org with the subject “VSYA25” and the applicant’s 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.

For further questions, don’t hesitate to contact Peiran Jiao via office@expfin.org.

Deadline for submission: November 15, 2025