Babson Professors Honored for Research Papers

A pair of Babson College professors recently won awards for research papers they co-authored.

Linghang Zeng, assistant professor of finance at Babson

Linghang Zeng, assistant professor of finance, was awarded the best paper in fintech at the Financial Management Association (FMA) Annual Meeting in October in Atlanta. Zeng’s paper—“Measuring Firm-Level Inflation Exposure: A Deep Learning Approach”—develops a novel measure of firm-level inflation exposure by applying a deep learning model to firms’ earnings conference call transcripts. The paper is co-authored by Sudheer Chava, Wendi Du, and Agam Shah, all of Georgia Institute of Technology. At Babson, Zeng teaches undergraduate finance courses, including FinTech and Principles of Finance. Select students in his fintech course will be competing in the inaugural Babson FinTech Start Up Pitch Competition on December 1.

FMA is a global leader in developing and disseminating knowledge about financial decision making. Earlier this year, Babson Finance Professor Michael Goldstein was appointed the secretary/treasurer of the FMA.

Sebastian Fixson, associate dean of academic programs and innovation

And, Sebastian Fixson—the associate dean of academic programs and innovation at the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, and the Marla M. Capozzi MBA’96 Term Chair in Design Thinking, Innovation and Entrepreneurship—won the Tom Hustad Best Paper Award for 2021 from the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) at the recent JPIM Research Forum. Fixson’s paper—“The Transformation of the Innovation Process: How Digital Tools are Changing Work, Collaboration, and Organizations in New Product Development”—details the effects that digital tools have had on innovation work, and how this helped shape forms of collaboration and organizational structures in new product development. The paper was co-authored with Tucker Marion of Northeastern University.

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