8th SGF Conference, 8 April 2005 - SWX Best Paper Award

The SWX Swiss Exchange today once again presented its SWX Best Paper Award at the annual conference of the Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, SGF. This year's award was won by the "Portfolio Performance, Discount Dynamics, and the Turnover of Closed-End Fund Managers" study compiled by Russ Wermers, Youchang Wu and Josef Zechner. The award ceremony took place at the SWX Swiss Exchange's ConventionPoint conference centre.

120 papers were entered for the conference and thus also for the SWX Best Paper Award. They were assessed in several stages by almost 100 internationally renowned expert reviewers.

Prof. Markus Rudolf, Director of the SGF conference, had this to say on the winning paper: "This is a clever paper with a new twist on the closed-end fund puzzle. The authors find that managers who are replaced tend to have presided over a fund that experienced underperformance. The strength of this paper is the focus on the labour market for fund managers."

Jürg Spillmann, Head of the SWX Group, underscored the importance of financial market research for financial centres and centres of financial knowledge. The origins of the winning paper's team of authors are particularly striking, with three authors from three continents: American Russ Wermers, Chinese Youchang Wu and Austrian Josef Zechner.

The study, as well as further information on the SWX Best Paper Award and on the SGF conference, can be found on the SWX Swiss Exchange website. http://www.swx.com/information/publications/div_pub_en.html