Bringing High Finance Down to Earth

If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? If that tree is pulped into the pages of an academic journal focusing on finance, then no, it does not. Outside the corridors of academia, precious few humans actually read the contents of publications such as the Journal of Finance, the Accounting Review, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, to pick on a few. That’s too bad, given how hard scholars work on their submissions and how diligently editors referee the ideas inside. Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor of finance at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, is attempting to alleviate the problem with a new periodical that gathers the most accessible articles from established journals, distills them to just a few pages, and repackages them for a (slightly) wider audience.