Finance professors Jose Martinez and Namho Kang have both received prestigious recognitions for their separate research endeavors.

Martinez won the BlackRock Prize, awarded to the best paper on capital markets/funds management/mutual funds for a paper he co-authored on “Measuring the Added Value of Stock Recommendations.” Using data from the Stockholm Stock Exchange, Martinez and his colleagues studied the value added by analysts’ recommendations.

They discovered how abnormal returns can be a misleading measure of the value of recommendations; and using the alternative measure of abnormal profits were able to compare the gains made by brokers with those made by their clients.

The award was presenting at the Australasian Finance and Banking Conference in Sydney in December. The conference brings together leaders in the financial community, international academics and industry professionals from the Asia-Pacific Region. Martinez collaborated with professors Anders Anderson, from the Swedish House of Finance and Howard Jones of University of Oxford.

Kang was awarded the PanAgora Asset Management’s 2016 Crowell Second Prize for his paper titled “Real-time Corporate Sales and its Effects on Earnings Management, Surprises and Drift,” which discovered that retail CEOs often downplay their company’s success when speaking to shareholders. The prize, in honor of the Boston-based firm’s founder, is one of the most well-known awards granted by asset management firms and is given for new and cutting-edge research that connects theory and practice.

Kang collaborated with professors Ronnie Sadka of Boston College, Kenneth Froot of Harvard and Gideon Ozik of EDHEC Business School of France. Their work was selected from more than 100 submissions and was described by the company as “truly outstanding” and noteworthy for its contribution to the science of economics and as a vital part of the development of optimal investment strategy.

“Both are highly prestigious awards,” said Professor Chinmoy Ghosh, finance department head. “It is a great recognition to the outstanding research conducted by these faculty members, and a tremendous inspiration for the junior faculty members and the Ph.D. students of the department. We expect both papers to attract large attention from the academic and practitioner communities.”