History

In the summer of 1986, Wolfgang Bühler, Herbert Hax and Reinhard Schmidt launched an initiative to apply, together with a larger group of colleagues, for funding at the German Research Foundation for a priority programme “Empirical Capital Market Research”. 35 colleagues supported this initiative. In 1998, the German Research Foundation granted funding for setting up three projects collecting stock market, bond market and financial accounting data. In 1989, another 18 research projects were funded under the umbrella of the priority programme that combined financial research in Germany in an unprecedented way.

Multi-day workshops, starting in 1990 in Nordkirchen, followed by similar events in Günzburg, Kronberg and Osnabrück, offered a platform for presentations and discussion among project staff, project leaders and evaluators from the German Research Foundation that were so lively and stimulating that they created the desire to create a more permanent institution for intellectual exchange of new finance research. As it was apparent that most project staff would soon begin working outside academia, this institution should be open to all interested in financial research, independent of whether they work in academia or in the financial industry.

Against this background, Hermann Göppl suggested the idea of a German Finance Association that was met with widespread approval during the 7^th workshop in Osnabrück, held on 9 October 1993. Thanks to his preparations, the German Finance Association was founded in the headquarters of Bayerische Hypotheken- and Wechselbank in Munich on 26^th November 1993. The founding members were Wolfgang Bühler, Günter Franke, Günter Gebhardt, Wolfgang Gerke, Hermann Göppl, Thomas Hartmann-Wendels, Walter Krämer, Hans Peter Möller, Sigrid Müller, Hartmut Schmidt, Reinhard Schmidt, Siegfried Trautmann, Martin Weber, Josef F. Wertschulte and Jochen Wilhelm.

DGF History

Years and locations of the meetings, chairperson and number of members of the DGF