In what he calls a career highlight, Chicago Booth’s Steve Kaplan has been named a fellow of the American Finance Association, a prestigious lifetime appointment. The AFA’s Society of Fellows of the Association was founded to recognize members who have made a distinguished contribution to the field of finance.
“It tells you that your research has had an impact,” says Kaplan, the Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance and the Kessenich E. P. Faculty Director at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. “That’s what’s awesome about it: The top finance academics are recognizing that your research, over time, has had an impact.”
Kaplan is one of 12 University of Chicago professors elected to the society since its inception in 2000, the most of any university. Before Kaplan, the most recent Booth professor named an AFA Fellow was Robert W. Vishny, the Myron S. Scholes Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and the Neubauer Faculty Director of the Davis Center, who received the honor in 2018.
Potential new AFA Fellows are nominated and elected by a committee made up of AFA members, with the final selection made by a vote of current Fellows.
"His work on private equity, leveraged buyouts, and venture capital is the best that I know.”
Douglas W. Diamond, another AFA Fellow and winner of the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, commented on Kaplan’s selection:
“Winning means that the AFA Fellows judge that the impact of the research is at the very top of academic finance,” says Diamond, the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance. “In Steve’s case, his research produced empirical results that challenged prevailing thought about several issues. The results stood the test of time. His work on private equity, leveraged buyouts, and venture capital is the best that I know.”
Papers by Kaplan, who also serves as a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, have been cited thousands of times and have helped push forward PE scholarship. One of the best-known is the oft-cited “Private Equity Performance: Returns, Persistence, and Capital Flows,” published in The Journal of Finance with MIT’s Antoinette Schoar in 2005. In it, Kaplan and Schoar outline their public market equivalent PE benchmarking approach.
Beyond his scholarship, Kaplan also helped establish Booth’s entrepreneurship concentration for MBA students as well as the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge, one of the top accelerator programs in the country. Since its inception, the NVC has helped launch household brands such as Braintree/Venmo, Grubhub, and Simple Mills.
Being an AFA Fellow is an honor, Kaplan says—he feels deep acknowledgment for his career spent researching important topics. The overarching theme of his research, Kaplan says, is thinking of incentive and capital structures that create economic value through a finance lens.
“I always try to study topics that are meaningful not only in academia but in the real world,” Kaplan says. “With most of my papers, both academics and businesspeople can read them and take something away—they’re big-picture topics. I have a line: ‘You can study the elephant, or you can study the pimple on the elephant’s behind.’ You want to do the former, not the latter.”
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