Each year, the Bendheim Center for Finance awards the Ben Bernanke Prize in Financial and Monetary Economics to an exceptional Princeton Ph.D. student (or students) who has written an outstanding draft of a “job market paper” for the subsequent academic job market in the fields of finance or monetary economics.

This year, Ph.D. student Nicolas Hommel has been awarded this prestigious prize. Hommel’s job market paper, “Firms’ Foreign Exchange Hedging,” studies the determinants and real impact of currency hedging. Using a novel contract-level dataset on European firms’ derivatives portfolios, Hommel and his co-author find that currency risk is large and concentrated, with firms engaging in substantial but incomplete hedging. Learn more about Nicolas Hommel’s research on his website.

The prize is named in honor of Ben Bernanke, who as Chairman of Princeton’s Department of Economics established the Bendheim Center for Finance. During his distinguished tenure at Princeton, Bernanke shaped Princeton and taught at the graduate and undergraduate levels.