Dear NFA Members and Guests,

Welcome to the 35th NFA Annual Meeting and Conference in the vibrant city of Toronto, Canada. We are delighted to have you here and trust that this year's conference will be both engaging and informative.

This year is particularly significant as it marks our first gathering post-pandemic when we can finally let go the constraints imposed by COVID. It is also a record-breaking year of paper submissions, with almost 1,300 submissions received. In response to this tremendous interest, we are coming back in full swing with a program featuring 120 papers organized into 40 regular sessions.

Our paper review process has evolved, adopting a two-step assessment approach. One of our 63 Associate Program Chairs first pre-screened each paper, followed by in-depth reviews by at least three independent reviewers. We are immensely grateful to our program committee, comprising 306 members, for their diligent evaluations and valuable feedback.

In addition to our academic sessions, we have dedicated four sessions to PhD work, featuring 12 student papers. To further showcase the research of young scholars, we have introduced a PhD poster session with four additional papers from current PhD candidates. Special thanks go to Vincent Glode (Wharton) for his diligent efforts in organizing the PhD sessions.

This meeting continues the trend of growth and improvement, characterized by increased submissions, enhanced participation in the review process, greater attendance, and improved selectivity. We also believe this year’s program strikes a good balance between maintaining our Canadian character by including a broad representation of Canadian scholars, while simultaneously becoming more global in nature.

The highlight of our conference will be the keynote speech by Professor Lauren H. Cohen, the L.E. Simmons Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School on Saturday, September 9.

We express our heartfelt thanks to our NFA co-presidents, Nathalie Moyen and Akiko Watanabe, as well as the NFA board of directors, for their guidance over the past year. We also express our gratitude to our sponsors and exhibitors for their continued and invaluable support.

Lastly, we look forward to seeing you in person during our two evening events: the reception on Friday, September 8, at the Regatta Room at the Westin Hotel, and the reception-dinner event at the renowned CN Tower on September 9. We hope this iconic Toronto landmark will leave memorable experiences. We also hope you will enjoy the 2023 NFA meeting and encourage you to continue contributing to the success of future NFA conferences by participating as reviewers, discussants, or session chairs.

Best Regards,

Yelena Larkin and Lilian Ng

Yelena Larkin

Lilian Ng