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Alumni News February 18, 2021

Olivier Darmouni (Ph.D. ‘16) wins 2021 Distinguished Paper Brattle Prize

Every January, the associate editors of The Journal of Finance award the Brattle Group Prizes to papers published in The Journal from the year before in recognition of outstanding academic achievement in the field of corporate finance.

Among this year’s winners is Olivier Darmouni, associate professor at Columbia Business School and former Ph.D. student at Princeton BCF. Darmouni’s distinguished paper, Informational Frictions and the Credit Crunch, examines the role of informational friction in inhibiting credit reallocation during the 2007 – 2009 U.S. financial crisis.

Since his time at BCF, Darmouni has contributed numerous publications to the fields of finance and economics, with special interests in credit markets, monetary policy, and information economics.

In this short interview, Lindsay Bracken, BCF’s Manager of Career Development, Alumni Relations, and Corporate Affiliates, talks to Darmouni about his career path since graduating with his Ph.D. in economics in 2016.

If you’re a Princeton BCF alumnus who’s reached a milestone in your career, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to Bracken (lbracken@princeton.edu) to stay in touch and tell your story.

Bracken: Congratulations on the award! How did it feel to be recognized by The Journal of Finance for your work?

Darmouni: It was a great surprise! It is especially rewarding given that this article was my main dissertation chapter, something I worked on painstakingly for literal years! It’s a great way to cap a formidable time I had at Princeton during my PhD.

Bracken:  For the sake of some of our readers who might not be familiar with it, would you mind explaining what the Brattle prize is and how you were nominated?

Darmouni: Every year, editors of the Journal of Finance, the leading journal in the field, award three prizes in the field of corporate finance.

Bracken: Tell us about your research. How did you become interested in the topic for this paper, and what was the research and publication process like for you?

Darmouni:  I was an undergraduate during the Great Financial Crisis, and I wanted to pursue research on that topic during graduate school: why was the crisis so severe? What went wrong in credit markets? Research is a fascinating journey; I never get bored!

Bracken:  What courses or experiences at Princeton BCF were most helpful to you in cultivating your academic and research interests?

Darmouni: The whole program was fantastic. I remember fondly my macro-finance class taught by Markus Brunnermeier.

Bracken:  What advice do you have for current or future Ph.D. students at Princeton BCF as they look forward to the next step in their career?

Darmouni: Don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone and work on things you are truly passionate about!

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