Josef Zechner is finance professor at the WU Vienna University of Economics and Business and Speaker of the Vienna Graduate School of Finance (VGSF). Before, he was professor at the University of Vienna and at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His research covers a broad set of topics in Corporate Finance, Banking, and Asset Management and is published in leading journals, including The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Political Economy. He is past president of the Western Finance Association, the European Finance Association and the German Finance Association and vice president of the Society of Financial Studies. He is also a member of the Austrian Academy of Science and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and holds an honorary doctoral degree from the Ludwig –Maximilians-Universit?t München (LMU).  Professor Zechner is Advisory Editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, and Associate Editor of Foundations and Trends? in Finance and has served as Managing Editor of the Review of Finance and as a member of the Advisory Scientific Committee (ASC) of the European Systemic Risk Board of the European Central Bank (ECB). He has consulted for various financial institutions and regulators and is a member of the scientific board of IQAM Invest, an Austrian asset management company owned by DekaBank.